Some communities are unexpected, such as the community that evolves from prison life. Prison systems develop into places where prisoners are both colleagues and adversaries to one another, where relationships are established based on power, love, money, and time. Within the environment of prison life, unlikely artistic expressions have flowered over time and over cultures. Tattooing is perhaps the most commonly known artistic expression in prison life, but there are numerous examples of more fully developed arts, which are often allowed to mature in the gray environment of incarceration.

 In 1964, Frank Jones was serving a life sentence for murder in Huntsville, Texas, when he salvaged red and blue accountants’ pencil stubs from the garbage and recycled discarded paper from the prison office where he worked. He rather quickly developed his singular forms and palette and subjects, architectural structures constructed from barbed-wire-like shapes drawn in red and blue. He called them “devil houses” and peopled them with “haints,” or ghosts, also clothed in the same red and blue barbed-wire motif that defines every Frank Jones drawing. Each creature smiles, so as, in the artist’s words, “to get you to come closer….to drag you down and make you do bad things.” Some of his drawings recall the architecture of the state penitentiary in Huntsville. Communal codes of prison life, the clock, the cell, the barbed wire, the inhuman creatures, are evident everywhere. Jones signed many of his drawings with only his prison number, further marking the community and the culture from which this artwork was born.

Brooke Davis Anderson, "Devil House," exhibition label for Folk Art Revealed. Stacy C. Hollander and Brooke Davis Anderson, curators. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2004.

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated with new research. Records are reviewed and revised, and the American Folk Art Museum welcomes additional information.　

To help improve this record, please email photoservices@folkartmuseum.org