
Yesterday, I attended a teacher training at the Musuem of International Folk Art (MOIFA) in Santa Fé called “Between the Lines: Prison Art and Advocacy.” The in-service, and the exhibit that inspired it, focused on the role that the arts can play in spaces of incarceration as a way to feel and be seen after prisoners are “disappeared” from society in prisons across the country and around the world. I left this day, which I attended with around 30 other elementary and high school teachers, with a renewed feeling of why teaching in the arts matters, and why the “first responder” work that educators do is so essential to restitching the frayed social fabric of our communities in New Mexico and across the US, one student, and one story, at a time.
Folks leading our day included Chicana activists and educators, Albuquerque Poet Laureate and Creative Writing teacher Hakim Bellamy, a colleague + friend who taught writing and art in the NM State Penitentiary, and two formerly incarcerated men, JP Jaramillo and Adam Griegos, both of whom are now community organizers and prison reform advocates in their own right.
We spent the day listening, looking, and making art ourselves (our own decorated envelopes inspired by envelope motifs made by inmates), in conversation with others, sharing dreams, failures and triumphs in our teaching as it relates to the prison system across the US and the many ways it impacts our students, directly and indirectly. We learned more about the statistics of who is incarcerated in the US, and the ripple effects this has on every person connected to the incarcerated individual. Presenters expressed how artmaking, in a prison context, is essential to restoring a sense of dignity, humanity and the reminder that your story is unique and valid, no matter your mistakes or the difficult road you traveled.

Beyond this is also the question of how we teach what we teach, and summoning the grace and skill to do this in skillful ways, even with difficult and challenging students.. Tattoo artist JP Jaramillo, of Santa Fé, emphasized the importance of pausing and making space for students, and for ourselves, in systems that dehumanize us, whether that is a prison, a public school, or a University. This also resonated deeply. In the face of bureaucratic institutions whose rules, often aimed to protect students and teachers, become unwieldy, oppressive or at times even encourage the abuse of power between the powerful and the powerless, pausing, and taking time to reclaim space for ourselves and for our students, showing a little tenderness, can be the most radical act, the most subversive thing we can do. JP, with a quiet force and a heart-felt presence, stressed to teachers and artists the central importance of what we do when working with students; we are often the first responders, whether we see or know that or not, to children and people who have experienced trauma. If we allow ourselves to become dehumanized by the systems around us, we can no longer be a place of solace for our students, or for those around us. Slowness is a foundation around which we can organize the architecture of our lives.
Another takeaway from the show, itself, was around “restorative architecture,” or the ways that the spaces we live in–color, shapes, light, angles, design–can aid or prevent our own healing for those of us residing in those spaces. So, the galley was filled with soft corners, earth tones, and lots of gentle light, throughout, as a suggestion for how spaces of incarceration might similarly adapt to become spaces of rehabilitation rather than places that punish. Another takeaway was the incredible ingenuity that human beings have when faced with limitations. This includes limitations in artmaking supplies and tools. So, there were incredibly detailed pieces of “folk” art and paper sculptures, made from newspaper, toilet paper tubes, toothpicks, and “paños” or painted/drawn/etched handkerchiefs, from all over the world. Out of scarcity comes plenitude, and generosity, when we set our time and intention accordingly.
This day focused on pedagogy was also deeply inspiring for my own work teaching songwriting and performing in prisons in Sweden, Italy and North Carolina, and the creation of the Prison Song Project, a project I launched in 2022 and am hoping to continue in Denmark, next year, as part of a year-long grant in which I’ll be teaching/working in Danish prisons, specifically (stay tuned for more on this in coming months). That project I have elsewhere framed as:
The Prison Song Project (TPSP) is a prison arts initiative bringing arts into New Mexico prisons. It features a pilot project between the University of New Mexico (UNM) and Albuquerque’s Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC). Over the course of a semester, the program pairs incarcerated persons at the county jail, MDC, with students from UNM Songwriting III, Songs for Social Justice class. The mission is to grow skills in intercultural communication, for college students and inmates, and assist in reducing recidivism in New Mexico through teaching a) collaboration b) deep listening c) sharing one’s story in a public space and d) a deeper sense of connectedness to the “outside” world. Through sixteen weeks of writing a song together, the students and inmates will share their stories, collaboratively write songs, sharpen skill sets, and build relationships across the prison wall. The songwriters will perform their songs in two final concerts featuring all participants. The songwriting experience and recorded songs will also be shared in a podcast, “Sing Me Back Home,” available to a national listening audience through anchor.fm.
Deep gratitude to the Museum of International Folk Art and Patricia Sigala and Chloe Accardi for organizing this Teacher In-Service. For those of you in New Mexico, you can see this beautiful show on Museum Hillin Santa Fé through September 2nd, 2025.
#ThePrisonSongProject #TogetherAtTheTable # #LifeatThreeMilesanHour #BetweenTheLinesPrisonArt_Advocacy

Great to see you, Kristina! Was super excited to hear about your project in Denmark. I am so looking forward to seeing the musically born fruit of that project.
Hakim
Hej Kristina!
Thank you... it’s truly a wonderful thing that someone wants to help the outcasts to a better life. Hope to see you in Denmark 😀
Good luck from Henrik!