Headphones | Art of Voices #Brianna

Headphones

Back with another digital piece by Brianna for our Art of Voices collection!  This 'Headphones' piece recreates a moment I captured on camera from a Voices Behind Walls workshop in juvenile prison.  On that day to encourage donations, I decided to take photos of participants with equipment we needed; this included headphones.  The individual captured in the photograph was one of our most dedicated participants.  I remember him recording only once but he always showed up to listen to music his peers created giving them constant support and encouragement.  In many ways, I viewed him as the life of the workshop. He had a contagious sense of humor and was always respectful when it came time for his peers to get down to business and do their recordings... his character was a cure for tension.  He was also one of the smallest kids in the prison, one of the youngest.  As you can see in the picture he sits atop a desk in front of the round table we used for recording that I referred to as the cypher.

Years later when I study this photograph one of the details that stands out to me most is the headphone jack isn't connected to anything.  I remember us doing this intentionally for the photograph.  Today it means a lot to me especially when I think of the disconnected feeling youth experience from the rest of the community and their families while they're incarcerated.  Also I think about the sensory deprivation that prisons were built off of historically.  

In Hip Hop, headphones are one of those things that connect us all around the world.  Many of us were raised between a set of headphones.  In a report published by the Weill Music Institute and Carnegie Hall titled 'May the Songs I Have Written Speak for Me, An Exploration of the Potential of Music in Juvenile Justice', it states the following..."At no time is the power of music more pronounced than during adolescence.  Only sleep trumps music in those years.  Teenagers listen to, create, or watch music between four and five hours a day - more than they spend watching television or hanging out with friends outside of school.  Young people think and dream in lyrics, find transport in melody, and improvise on riffs, solos, and beats accumulated through hours of listening."

The foundation of Voices Behind Walls is its connection to sound, its priority of placing youth voices first, and inspiring participants through music.

The book depicted in the digital art by Brianna is Vatos by Luis Alberto Urrea with photographs by Jose Galvez.  This was one of the most popular books in our workshop, mostly photography based with words by Urrea that is described as a "hymm to vatos who will never be in a poem...".

The youth depicted in the artwork had since been released when I overheard another participant years later talking about the trouble he got into after the juvenile prison let him out.  Often times, the stories of incarcerated youth are discontinued upon their release and on some occasions picked up in newspapers... the vicious cycle of what some consider an abysmal recidivism rate in urban and mostly rural communities where resources are few and far between.

#Lee

Art of Voices is a Voices Behind Walls (VBW) project supported by Community Solutions of El Paso to recruit illustrators through Volunteer Match to help recreate VBW workshop photographs into art.  The photographs were taken during workshop activities in juvenile detention between the years of 2006-2014.  Artistic remakes of the photographs protect the identity of workshop participants by changing details of face and other identifiers.  The purpose of this project is to document the VBW program's history and the creative expression activities incarcerated youth were engaged in.  This project also offers the VBW photographer and illustrators an opportunity to reflect on what the images say about the juvenile justice system and the importance of creative expression activity for youth as a means of education, therapy, self-improvement, community engagement, rehabilitation, positive Hip Hop activity, and mentorship.