Sep 22

Sep 22 Ojai Jail Arts Initiative

Written by Andra Belknap

Graffiti from the Ojai jail, redrawn by artist Kevin Roper. Work edited by Sarah Mirk for the Ojai Jail Arts Initiative placed over a photo by Ted Nava

Ogletree’s is one of many messages, poems, and markers of time etched onto the concrete walls of the Ojai Jail. Sometimes mistaken for a supply closet or a forever-locked bathroom, the Ojai Jail was built in 1929. The building’s concrete walls and four cells housed more than 650 prisoners over half a century before it was closed in the 70s. It’s traditionally opened once a year, on Ojai Day. Not for incarceration purposes, to be clear — as a community artifact. Ojai Day 2020 was an exception to the tradition for obvious reasons, but Historic Preservation Commissioner Brian Aikens provided the next best thing: a YouTube virtual tour (in a pillbox-style prison cap).

The Ojai Jail is located inside Libbey Park.

Aside from Ojai Day, the concrete building is generally ignored. It’s a “dead space,” curator Matt Henriksen observed, “dead center in the middle of our town.”

October 8 through 16th, Henriksen, alongside collaborators Elizabeth Herring and Ted Nava — Ojai residents all — will make the jail the center of a site-specific, multi-disciplinary group exhibition. Presented for free to the public, the Ojai Jail Arts Initiative (OJAI, hah) will showcase new works from six artists whose mediums include woven fiber, sound, sculpture, comics, and more. The new works will be installed in, outside, and around the jail for one week. It’s not just art that is public, says Nava, “it’s also art that is in conversation with the place.”

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The Origin of O.J.A.I.

Henriksen, Herring, and Nava last worked together to present Herrings’ Ojai City Gift: a faux hyper-local gift shop in the window of The Basic Premise, Nava and Henriksen’s former gallery space on the east side of Ojai Avenue. Its window front showing was necessitated by pandemic public health guidelines. “That kind of work was priming us for branching out more into the public space,” Nava said in retrospect.

Ojai City Gift included a photo cutout board of an Instagram post, “liked” by the New York Times and “thousands of others.” Sounds right.

This was 2020, and Herring, who grew up in Ojai, had recently moved home from Germany. Fresh in her mind was the Skulptur Projekte Münster, a German art exhibition in which statues are installed in public places throughout the community. It happens once a decade. So, while Henriksen and Nava were curating art shows immediately outside their gallery, Herring was ruminating on bringing something like she saw in Germany to Ojai.

MORE ABOUT ELIZABETH HERRING

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That’s the environment in which O.J.A.I. was conceived. And the group’s interest soon turned to the old jail in the center of town.

Now, in order to create (sanctioned) public art in Ojai, one must first seek the judgment of the Ojai Arts Commission. And the nascent project very easily could have died in City Council Chambers. Thankfully, the opposite happened. The collaborators were encouraged by Art Commissioner Christine Steiner — “the mentor of the project,” according to Herring — to seek public funding for the work. They succeeded. All in all, the October exhibition required the consultation of the Historic Preservation, Parks and Recreation, Arts Commission, and sign-off from the Ojai City Council over a period of two years.

“There’s this weird thing that happens when you go when you get rubber-stamped by a bunch of officiants,” Henriksen observed. “Everybody starts to take you seriously.”

O.J.A.I.’s Artists

Equipped with a grant from the Ojai Arts Commission, Henriksen, Herring, and Nava commissioned work from six diverse artists: Brett William Childs, Annette Heully, Vanessa Wallace Gonzales, Hailey Loman, Sarah Mirk, and James Whipple. All of the artists either grew up in Ventura County or live here currently.

Mirk, a comics journalist and artist, took photos of the jail’s half-century-old graffiti and asked incarcerated people in California (via snail mail) to respond. “If you could, what would you write or draw on the wall of a cell for people to see 50 years in the future?” She asked.

Mirk, who grew up in Ojai, compiled their responses — some written, some illustrated — into a zine. One respondent drew an image of a woman and an ape staring at each other, prison bars between them. The artist wonders, “who visits who?” Another man, Steven J. Levy, declared: “I refuse to die quietly in a cell. I am not a voiceless man.”

“I hope what comes through in this zine is that the people we put in jail, whether it’s in 1969 or today, are real people, with real lives, feelings, and dreams,” Mirk said.

Loman’s work carries a similar tone. “I feel rather complicated about making art in a jail,” she said. “We have lots of loved ones inside that are suffering.”

She plans to install, among other work, two five-foot tall black and white ink drawings: the figures of a sheriff and a robber in stripes. The figures’ faces are cut out so event attendees can inhabit the “good” or “bad” character.

Loman’s work explores the way in which carceral spaces evolve into “tourist sites.” Visitors to spaces like the Ojai Jail, she observed, leave with the idea that “I would not end up there, others would.”

Heully sits under the orange light of her work in progress for O.J.A.I. Photo Elizabeth Herring.

Other artists engage with the space outside of its cultural and political context: fiber artist Annette Heully has been walking to Libbey Park from her Ojai home almost daily, examining the oak tree canopy for the perfect place to install her translucent, woven fiber installation. As she theorized her work, she thought about the daily experience of a prisoner in the Ojai Jail,

“you’re watching the sun and shadow go back and forth and listening to the bell,” she imagined. (I’m reminded of Ogletree’s poem.)

Heully’s work — crafted on a 16 harness dobby loom — will use the sun’s light to cast sunset tones around exterior jail space. “I have a feeling that people are going to play in the light,” she said.

Additional work on display inside and out of the jail will include a book of photography by Childs, a sound installation by Whipple, and a sculptural installation in the interior of the jail created by Wallace Gonzales (for a hint of what’s to come, check out “The Individuation” at the Basic Premise). The work will be accessible to the public daily from October 8th - 16th. I will admit that many of the people involved in O.J.A.I. (hah) are my friends. And for good reason! Don’t miss this show.