ANNE HAYDEN STEVENS

THE 51st STATE: Prison Neighborhood Arts Project | Statesville Prison, Illinois

Artist Damon Locks has worked for years with artists at Statesville on graphic novels and comics. During the pandemic, when he could not work with the artists in person, Damon reached out to other artists and asked them to do the assignments virtually, alongside the incarcerated artists. The prompts were rich and complicated. These pieces are the outcome of four separate assignments.

ASSIGNMENT #1: CONVERSATION WITH YOURSELF ABOUT LIBERATION: single panel

ASSIGNMENT #2: THE LOST PLACE

ASSIGNMENT #3 CHANGE AND TRANSFORMATION: a two page spread

ASSIGNMENT #3 CHANGE AND TRANSFORMATION: a second two page spread to complete the Assignment #3

Above: ASSIGNMENT #1: CONVERSATION WITH MYSELF ABOUT LIBERATION. This is about my earliest experiences of racism.

Below: ASSIGNMENT #3: CHANGE & TRANSFORMATION. In this assignment we were to make a two page spread that leads up to a point of transformation. I actually used a cliffhanger at the end of the second page, lol. I did not realize this as I was doing the drawings.

This spread is about the origin story of an avatar I use in my oil paintings. Since starting to study Chinese painting, I realized how few women are depicted in the paintings and documented in the historical record. I started doing some research and began to assemble a strong, intellectual artist in my mind, who moved through the mountains as men did it traditional Chinese landscape painting. In this spread, she is the artist running an artwork production studio that made a piece I saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Mythical Landscape with Immortals. She is shown overseeing the completion of the work, the distribution of the work, and then leaving the studio to head into the mountains.

In the fourth assignment, the second two page spread, she ascends into the sky to be with the immortals, and then returns to her studio replenished. These are pencil, ink, acrylic and gesso on 22x30 drawing sheets.