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July 27, 2005
East Bay Express - 15 to Life Review
Now You See It --- Why even talk about pictures?
By Anneli Rufus
July 27, 2005
...Such second-guessing is funny and frightening. But sometimes art does have an agenda. It got Anthony Papa out of jail. In Fifteen Years to Life, Papa -- writing from the first-person point of view, though his memoir has a coauthor -- recounts how as a hard-luck young husband and father, he let a guy in a bowling alley talk him into delivering four ounces of cocaine for $500, got caught, and thanks to New York's draconian drug laws drew the titular sentence in Sing Sing. There, amid quotidian brutalities described in a blockish style that sometimes trips over its own urgency, this first-time offender contemplated suicide, hankering as the years crawled past after "something to get out of bed for in the morning." One day, an armed robber introduced him to watercolors. Never having painted before, Papa was transformed, spending his days at the prison studio, mixing colors while squinting through a small window at the Hudson: "Despite the coils of razor wire obstructing the view, the expansiveness of the river was awesome. ... Painting became my obsession."
Some of his works won prison art shows and were exhibited in the Whitney Gallery, spawning a flood of articles such as a New York Times full-pager about the inmate whose "reality is a canvas of rage and sorrow." Papa's talent for milking the press arguably outspans his painterly skills, but who could blame him? He knew which journalists to cultivate. He knew which well-wishers to enlist in his campaign for clemency. And he knew what to paint -- electric chairs, desperate hands, caged figures: "I knew that somehow it would help me get out." Twelve years into his sentence, it did. The fact that galleries then started rejecting him -- telling Papa his work was "too scattered or it didn't match the style of the other artists they represented" -- reveals a stark double standard: As a jailed painter, Papa was a novelty to be marveled at, not unlike some apt primate in a zoo. Freedom sheared off that polemical panache...
By Anneli Rufus
Original article: eastbayexpress.com
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