Columbia River Creative Initiatives is currently on hiatus and may resume in the future, this website serves as an archive of the project.
This is Not Contraband
For the second iteration of the exhibition series by Columbia River Creative Initiatives Artists in Residence in collaboration with Outer Space Gallery, we played around with simple everyday objects of prison life (like peanut butter jars, toiletries etc) to inform the public how those simple items can become contraband in prison by combining them (collecting candy in an empty ice cream container for example).
By sourcing and photographing these items individually in our studio space setting within the prison and only combining these objects after bringing them to the outside exhibition space, those items never really were contraband throughout our creative process but still tell a story about some of the limitations our incarcerated artists are facing in their day to day.
A collaboration by Columbia River Creative Initiatives Artists in Residence Jake Diepenbrock, Tommie Willis, Andrew Reeves, Mark Arnolds, Harold Whitebear Cubbedge and Henry J. Lohr, organized and curated by Anke Schüttler and Spencer Byrne-Seres
Generously Funded by a grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council.
Columbia River Creative Initiatives is a series of artist run programs and classes held at the Columbia River Correctional Institution, a minimum security prison in Northeast Portland, Oregon.
Columbia River Creative Initiatives
c/o PSU Art & Social Practice
PO Box 751
Portland, OR 97207