ART IN PRISON

 

 A collection of drawings, paintings, sculptures and objects, made by prisoners in the Prison of Nieuw Vosseveld, Vught, Holland. 

 

          

 

History

 Art education, in former days called home crafts, was developed in the same pace as the Nieuw Vosseveld prison developed from a small prison with mildly punished youths in 1960-1970 to what it is nowadays.

Nowadays PI Vught is one of the largest prisons in the country, with many different groups of inmates. The number of inmates needing specific care has grown rapidly these last few years.

All these changes have had an impact on the way we educate and lead groups and individual participants, but they have an even greater impact on the collection itself. Fortunately the profession always has been taken seriously in here, and there are six very well equipped professionals at work as a teacher.

The aim of art education has always been to find ways to enhance self-respect. Only with a certain amount of self-respect a person can do something positive when he leaves jail.

 

 

The “Boelen-Collection”

The “Boelen-Collection” goes back to about 25 years ago. It is called after teacher and artist Legs Boelen, who began to work with inmates in 1975, in Nieuw Vosseveld. First he began with plastic arts, later on he teached music as well. Then he started to collect the works of art that were created in prison. In most cases the artists left the works of art behind because they did not consider them to be important enough to be taken home. Often the works were given as a present. All these works were gathered in cupboards and were selected by Legs Boelen. Gradually a more and more specific collection came into being.

Especially after the first edition from the booklet “Art in prison”, which appeared in 1990, there was much publicity and a budget became available to frame a couple of works. Because of this the collection achieved a more or less official status (M. Piller, Economisch Dagblad, about the Boelen-Collection).

After that the collection has grown steadily with the help of several fellow teachers who also gathered work on new departments and different categories of inmates.

The aim of this website is to show people who never have been in prison, what kind of prison art has been created in the last decades. Ex-inmates may also like to look back and see if they recognize something of what they or their fellow inmates have created.