"MCLA’s location provided me with endless opportunities to gain professional experience in the arts. I had a lot of fun working as a tour guide at MASS MoCA and in the education department at the Berkshire Museum, which allowed me to figure out what kinds of jobs I would like and to meet a lot of interesting arts professionals along the way. MCLA’s small size helped me develop close working relationships with my favorite professors who always took time to advise me on academic and professional concerns. I really felt like they were with me all the way."
Monica Henry ’07 Education Coordinator, Clark Art Institute
News & Press Releases
March 5, 2008
NORTH ADAMS, MA – Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) will present “I, Too, Can Create: Art from American Prisons” on Wednesday, March 12, in the Amsler Campus Center room 324, at 5:30 p.m.
The lecture is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
Berkshire resident and author of “Cellblock Visions: Prison Art in America,” Phyllis Kornfeld, will present the lecture. She is an internationally known expert on prison art, and has been a painter and a teacher for a number of years. Since 1983, Kornfeld has been conducting visual art programs for prison inmates, from county jail to death row, and curates exhibitions of the art.
“Prisoners are human beings with the same potential for good as the rest of us. The evidence is this art, born in the penitentiary, art that challenges stereotypes of inmates,” said Lauren O’Neal, MCLA arts management professor. “Kornfeld speaks from her personal experience with the artists, their processes, and the prison environment in which the work was created.”
