The View from Here

The View from Here was a bi-coastal exhibition hosted at Paradigm Arts and Richmond Art Center. The exhibit was created through correspondence between artists incarcerated at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center in California and SCI Phoenix in Pennsylvania. Organized over the course of a year, the show emerged from written exchanges, shared reflections, and a desire to build connection across prison walls. The title, The View from Here, spoke to the artists’ perspectives on life inside, on what lay beyond, and on the humanity that persisted within systems built to contain.

At SCI Phoenix, artists described the absence of a literal view, no windows to the outside world. Built in an exurb outside of Philadelphia, across from the now-closed SCI Graterford, the facility offered only concrete, fences, and razor wire. From inside, they saw other incarcerated people, mostly Black, Brown, poor, and aging, disconnected from the world yet held together by community, memory, and resistance. Their works spoke from a place of confinement, but reached outward: through photocopied letters, phone calls, and rare visits, they imagined freedom, family, and futures not yet realized.

At San Quentin, artists could see beyond the walls to the Bay, to city life, to murals painted long ago. They described the wind off the ocean and the proximity of everyday life just beyond reach. Despite having access to a range of rehabilitative programs, they remained confined—serving long sentences, waiting for second chances. Their work captured this tension: between visibility and invisibility, between access and loss, between presence and yearning.

Together, the artists offered visual testimony to the emotional and physical landscape of incarceration. Their drawings, paintings, letters, and installations held sorrow, resilience, and radical imagination. The work was rooted in personal experience but spoke collectively: calling for justice, for parole, for an end to death by incarceration. It reflected not only on time lost, but on the possibility of transformation—through art, memory, and shared vision.

The View from Here was collaboratively created by artists from SCI Phoenix and San Quentin and curated by Phoebe Bachman and Carol Newborg, with support from Eduardo Ramirez, Cody Stuhltrager, and Kali Silverman.

Exhibiting artists included Raul Aguayo, Keith Andrews, Shelton Alford, Phoebe Bachman, Darwin Billingsley, Stan-Bey, Rev. M. Seishin Cadiz, Al Collantes, Jon D. Goldberg, James Green, Charles Harrison, Roy Holloway, Robert Kuikahi, Charles Lawson, Brad Odell, Erick Maciel, George Red, Eduardo Ramirez, Felix Rodriguez, Robert E. Rigler, Kali Silverman, Paul Stauffer, Mark Stanley, Thomas Schilk, and Tommy Tongpalan.