Pen and pencil drawings on pieces of fabric decorate the walls of Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art like a patchwork quilt. These art pieces are called paños, a Chicano folk art born behind bars in the Southwest and dating back to the thirties. Using the minimal materials available—often a handkerchief or torn sheet and ballpoint pen—incarcerated people create drawings, sometimes using symbolic imagery or cartoon characters. It is common for people to mail paños home to their loved ones.
With sixty-nine examples included, paños are an integral part of the exhibit Between the Lines, which will be on display at the folk art museum until September 2. The rest of the art pieces—200 in all—showcase other ways that incarcerated people are and have been creative with limited resources. Some examples in the show include flowers made from toilet paper and makeup, a jewelry box made of matches, and a doll composed of fabric scraps.
The exhibit also speaks to the area’s history. The New Mexico Prison Riot of 1980 south of Santa Fe was one of the country’s largest—-thirty-three people were killed. The riot’s impact and the community’s losses are commemorated in a compilation video of witness testimonies in the exhibit.
An earlier display at the museum opened in 2023, which had a stronger focus on incarcerated New Mexican artists. The current and larger exhibit showcases local work as well as that by people incarcerated across the United States and eleven other countries, including Turkey, Mexico, the Republic of Palau in Micronesia, and Saipan of the Northern Mariana Islands. The exhibit also features weavings made by detained Chinese asylum seekers who were incarcerated upon their illegal entry into the United States in the nineties. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the rate of incarceration in the United States is 580 people per 100,000, which is the second highest rate globally and just behind El Salvador.
The exhibit is currently being digitized to make it available to more people in and out of prison.
Sasha Weiss interviewed Patricia Sigala and Chloe Accardi in October 2023. Ellye Sevier contributed updates in March and April 2025. Sigala is an educator and community outreach and engagement specialist at the museum and was the 2016 museum art educator of the year for the state. Chloe Accardi is an independent folklorist and documentary artist and is the museum’s media specialist.The following has been edited for clarity and concision.
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Sasha Weiss: Where and when did the Between the Lines exhibit begin?
Chloe Accardi: First, we had a paños workshop in Albuquerque’s Metropolitan Detention Center in 2017 with over forty male inmates drawing with pen and ink on handkerchiefs. We saw raw creativity and the urge for expression in the blend of recurrent images and themes in Southwest prison art and Chicano culture, such as flowers, cars, tattoo designs, the Virgen de Guadalupe.
We saw personal narratives in the paños, many of which are drawn for or include portraits of and messages to specific people, either friends on the inside or family on the outside.
And then we held a series of dialogues with a small group of women who were attending the school inside the detention center. They made paños too; we talked about paño themes of community, like La Raza, faith, and family. A lot of what came out of these dialogues with the women was their personal stories, but also the larger ripple effects of mass incarceration. Many people had parents who were incarcerated and that ended up leading them along a certain path that resulted in their own incarceration. And, of course, it’s not always that simple, right? So out of these dialogues came this ripple, how their incarceration affects their siblings, potentially their children, or their parents, and their community.
The museum at large and specifically the Gallery of Conscience foster dialogue that bring community together and put people together who might not otherwise be in conversation with each other. At the jail, we weren’t allowed to record, so I feverishly typed notes from each session. Then, Patricia and I shared those conversations with youth at Santa Fe ¡YouthWorks!, a community organization that offers educational, job training, career, volunteer, and community service opportunities to marginalized young people. The stories of the women really resonate with the youth in Santa Fe—stories about growing up with incarcerated parents, the struggle to show up for children on the outside, and experiences of being judged for their or their loved ones’ histories of incarceration. The youth respond with, “Oh we know about this, we know about this personally,” or “We know about this through our family.” And so those conversations helped the youth open up and share their own stories and write poetry about incarceration. These conversations were primarily for the youth, to create a space for them to talk about their experiences with incarceration, but they also informed how the exhibit developed. We also wanted to bring their art into the exhibit, so we worked with a muralist in town, Sam Leyba, who collaborated with the youth to create a mural, a print of which is central to the exhibit, about the juvenile justice system, the school-to-prison pipeline, and mass incarceration.
We’ve been collecting paños for decades, but we also have many, many pieces of international prison art that have been collected over the years, as well as more recent pieces. Museum staff went to prison art sales that were happening more before COVID. [Many prisons organize heavily regulated art sales where the prison often takes a percentage of the sale]. Other individual curators just found pieces. And then we have donors and people who hear about our collection and come to us and say, “Hey, I have these paños that my dad had, are you interested in them?” The museum designs exhibits to be about the physical artwork, but it’s also about the story behind the artwork. We hoped that looking at this collection of pieces would be a gateway for people to talk about mass incarceration. Even taking a broader look at, OK, we’re talking about prisons and jails in the criminal justice system, but what about ICE detention centers? What about Native boarding schools? We started to really think about all the different ways that we can talk about incarceration and take an expansive view of how that’s affecting our country and our communities. Our goal is for this conversation to continue beyond the exhibit itself, which is why we’ve hosted panel discussions and poetry readings on themes of incarceration and community.
Patricia Sigala: Several other team members have flowed in and out of the curatorial team. While we are the co-curators of this exhibit, we are not authoritative voices because this is a community collaboration. We really wanted to center the voices and the experiences of the artists, both incarcerated and formerly incarcerated. Because the exhibit is so public, people come in andreply to the prompts we display and contribute to our talkback boards and other spaces we’ve created for visitors to comment. [Prompts include: Tell us which pieces are most interesting to you. What else would you like to know about these artworks and the artists that made them? What current issues about imprisonment and the incarcerated do you want to know more about and why?]. Sometimes people also come in and tell us about art by incarcerated artists they’ve come across elsewhere. They’ll show us photographs of pieces purchased at craft shows. Someone purchased some carvings and wanted to know if we wanted them in the show. We get offers like that, of things that people have collected over the years. The community conversation around the smaller, earlier exhibit [helped] us to shape the bigger exhibit.
What has it been like balancing the local story of incarceration in New Mexico and its effects on the communities of Bernalillo County, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque with broader narratives of national incarceration in ICE detention centers and boarding schools?
Chloe Accardi: Individual stories have elements of a universal story of incarceration. [Sigala] often says that the incarcerated are forgotten time and time again, no matter if it is juvenile detention or ICE. One of the overwhelming and heartbreaking themes of mass incarceration is dehumanization. Time and time again, these stories of what happens to prisoners in any of these systems gets buried under all of the legal jargon. And the back and forth in courts, the many steps that happen take power away from the incarcerated and erase the story of the individual. Instead, the focus is on the crime or whatever it is that puts them into these detention centers.
We’ve worked with a number of people who were in detention for ten years, twenty years. In the criminal detention system here, in the United States, they don’t stay in the same prison for that period of time. They get moved around and that’s part of the system—it’s meant to be disorienting. They don’t want people to build too many communities, so they ship them out. They ship them to Indiana or upstate New York and then back to Arizona or New Mexico. These systems [both prison and ICE detention] are set up to break a person down.
We worked with a counselor, Isabel Ribay, of Santa Fe Dreamers. She was working with detained clients that, for example, are crammed into a room and there’s no darkness, they keep the blaring fluorescent lights on all night. The food is terrible. And they don’t get sleep. So it’s all of these elements, including the architecture of the institutions, that are breaking people down.
Local Chicano artist John Paul Granillo helped us craft this exhibition. He led a youth dialogue in the Gallery of Conscience space this summer where he shared his story. He brought in his prison card. Very large on the prison card was his prisoner identification number and much smaller was his name. You become your number, not your story. So much of this work is looking at the art that people create, this creative expression, as an act of resistance in itself. The art that’s made is a reinforcement of humanity.
If they’re drawing a paño and that paño is going to be sent out to their kids, even if they are just drawing Disney characters or flowers or unicorns or something that like, when you first look at it, you’re like, OK that’s beautiful, that’s a nice thing for a child. But, in one of the dialogues, a woman named Candace shared with us that no, that is a parent communicating with their child. They are saying, “Hi child, I’m still here. I love you. I think about you every day.”
What we hear again and again from former inmates, currently incarcerated people, and advocates is that these systems are not set up to help people. They’re set up so that people go back. There’s so much money going into everything else with the prisons, but not rehabilitation.
Patricia Sigala: This is something that the art and stories surrounding the 1980 New Mexico State Penitentiary Riot really highlight. Our exhibits [included] a video on the history of the riot featuring interviews with incarcerated people as well those who were working in the prison as guards or teachers, before and after what has become known as the worst prison riot in US history. And what has changed? There’s still overcrowding and terrible conditions. A lot of things haven’t changed.
What has the reception to the exhibit been over the past several months?
Patricia Sigala: Visitors have responded positively and have been touched by the exhibition, as evidenced by the number of paper flowers created at our interactive station and placed on our community altar to signify good intentions for loved ones, hopes for advocacy and change, or simply a sign that you’ve been moved by the stories in this room. A docent told us, “I am inspired by the art made with such limited resources – it shows the human drive to make art cannot be destroyed.”
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Chicagoans and visitors can view paños through August 10 at the National Museum of Mexican Art. “Into the Hourglass: Paño Arte from the Rudy Padilla Collection,” is a traveling exhibition from the National Hispanic Cultural Center Art Museum in Albuquerque.
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Sasha Weiss is a PhD candidate at Indiana University. He has poetry chapbooks forthcoming from Ethel and Porkbelly Press this year.
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Ellye Sevier (she/her) is a Pacific Northwest local, arts writer, aspiring editor, and glass artist. She has published work in Atlas Magazine, YourMagazine, and Glass Quarterly. If you’d like to follow along with her artistic endeavors, you can find more of her glass artwork at @ellyerosestudios on Instagram.
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