The Atlantic: The breathtaking ingenuity of incarcerated artists
Spiz’s dinette, a toaster-size trailer with a propane tank no bigger than your thumb, was painstakingly crafted during Dean Gillispie’s years of incarceration at an Ohio prison.
Gillispie was freed thanks to UC's Ohio Innocence Project in December 2011 after serving 20 years in prison for rapes he did not do. Gillispie’s miniatures are part of an exhibition at MoMA PS1 through early April called “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” guest-curated by Nicole R. Fleetwood, a professor at Rutgers and an activist who has written a book by the same name.
The Atlantic featured Gillispie in a Feb. 7 feature article explaining that he "constructed the silver trailer by spreading cigarette-pack foil across notebook cardboard, and used pins taken from the prison sewing shop to hold the whole structure together. The window curtains, made from used tea bags, are partially closed. A tiny sign on the trailer door reads, in nearly microscopic inky script: gone fishing."
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