Work Out, 2006 [Enlarge in New Window]

Peggy Diggs: Work Out

"I have done public art projects since 1991, and have found that most everyone is an expert at something," says conceptual artist Peggy Diggs. "And prisoners, specifically, can identify the needs of people living an extremely reduced lifestyle."

Diggs teaches classes on the subjects of public art, justice, and feminism and activism at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. But her project with Creative Capital involves a different group of collaborators: ten prisoners at a maximum-security prison. Together, they've taken on the role of an industrial design team, with the goal of creating practical, flexible, and aesthetically pleasing items for living in small spaces. They call the project Work Out.

This past summer and fall, after completing a mandatory prison orientation session, Diggs met with the prisoners at Pennsylvania's State Correctional Institution at Graterford, near Philadelphia, for two days a week for nine weeks. After surveying examples of products already on the market, Diggs and her team—with the advice of Kreg Jones, an industrial designer—generated ideas about how to make tiny habitats more comfortable and versatile. They then experimented with design strategies by constructing prototype containers and other objects from basic materials like cardboard and tape.

The men chosen for the project were participants in the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program (MAP), which hires selected incarcerated prisoners to spend six hours a day, five days a week painting murals that are then displayed in various locations around the metropolitan area. "They are particularly motivated men who are engaged with art," Diggs explains. "As one said, 95 percent are serving life sentences for committing serious and violent crimes." Participation in MAP is considered an honor; to remain in the program, prisoners are required to be cooperative and professional. "My hope is that by showing that prisoners can think strategically and solve problems to produce items of use to themselves, each other, and the general public," says Diggs, "this project can chisel away at the widespread belief that prisoners are the waste products of society."

Diggs's Creative Capital grant is helping to fund the project. After the intensive workshopping months, the men presented a line of furniture which consisted of three items: a bed that converts into a piece that's part seat and part table, a mobile mini-office which transforms into a workspace from a neat, briefcase-sized kit that can fit easily behind a door for storage, and a boxlike structure featuring many small storage areas, including space for files and drawers for socks. After meeting with Philadelphia inventive ID firm MioCulture, Diggs and the prisoners felt it would be in the project's best interest to focus on one design and make the final piece out of cardboard. A model soon evolved which is being tentatively called Greaterfit—a play off of the name of the prison, but also a description of the unit, a cardboard desk/table/storage cabinet which can open up and close down, but maintains access to its storage in both configurations. To date, enough cardboard has been bought to make 50 Greaterfits.

Although the furniture line was developed by prisoners, it's not intended for prison use only, but for anyone living in a small space—from refugees in temporary housing to college students seeking inexpensive, flexible furniture, or even square-footage-deprived New Yorkers in cramped studio apartments. Although Diggs originally hoped the prisoners could get patents for their inventions, it turns out that they cannot, nor can they make money from sales, although paid for their labor. The prisoners have thus decided to make a small edition of furniture and donate it to Riverview House, a city-run assisted living facility in Philadelphia for people otherwise homeless.

[ About this article ]

Download this essay (PDF)

THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Visual > Public Art | Products & Consumerism | Labor | Politics | Northeast | 2005