The world as it was shown to me has never been enough. This has always frustrated me. One day while I was in kindergarten, I picked up a broken, dirty, black crayon and began to redraw the world the way I saw and felt it in my heart.
I chose the broken, dirty, black crayon, because it reminded me of how I saw myself. I chose it because it looked like me. It was the one that nobody wanted to use.
Since then I have learned to use every conceivable tool that makes and holds a mark. Growing up in the hood, I never saw anything as trash. Broken things and other folks' garbage was my treasure. Later, upon incarceration, I found a way to sketch despite the scarcity of art supplies. I found my voice while locked in solitary confinement using a three-inch rubber pen and scraps of paper, if I was blessed.
My influences were graffiti artists I saw in Brooklyn throwing up their pieces on the trains and walls. These are my folks, the bottom people. Down here we make our heroes. I was immediately drawn to the prospect of marking something that would show the world what beauty could come from a dirty broken black crayon. I remember the first time I wrote my name on the wall of the boys’ bathroom in kindergarten. I saw more of my authentic self in my five-year-old scrawl than I had ever seen of myself depicted anywhere on earth.
Recently I created a collection of five paintings titled "Blood In Eye," inspired by the late Comrade George L. Jackson’s book Blood In My Eye. Since age 13, I evolved from a criminal, to an animalized prisoner, to a revolutionary, and now into a feminist. I noticed the ledge where they assassinated George. It stopped the movement. His legacy compelled me to take the evolutionary next step.
As an artist, this was the ideal opportunity to use my talents to study our bloodline of resistance. I painted Lolita Lebron, Kathy Boudine, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur with blood in their eyes. I also put a red rose in their hair. The system said they were broken; I saw them as beautiful. They fought for me. Now it's my turn to keep it lit, and pay my respects to them. The world didn't give them enough respect. So I created a way to use my art to throw it up for my sheroes.
Corey Devon Arthur is an incarcerated writer and artist from Brooklyn, New York. He makes art as an intimate way to heal and offer hope of a reimagined future, where we strive to resist first with love, and then with all else we are made of. Corey hopes to create art until every corner of the earth and the people who inhabit it have been touched by his work.
Corey has participated in several exhibitions including: Capitalizing On Justice, New York (2019);
Return to Sender: Prison as Censorship, EFA Gallery NY, (2023); a solo art show, She Told Me Save The Flower, My Gallery Brooklyn, New York (2023) with a follow up display at the Brooklyn Public Library (2024); Work Assignments: Forced Prison Labor in the Land of the Free, several Bay Area locations (2023 & 2024); Paperchained International, Boom Gate Gallery, Australia (2024) and the upcoming exhibition Painting Ourselves Into Society, Berkeley Art Center (September 21st 2024 - January 12th, 2025).
HIs collection of “Quaker Paintings” are exhibited in Quaker meeting houses across the U.S. Corey collaborated with Brooklyn W.A.Y. to create numerous feminist and pro-social inspired art including his Save The Flower Registry, with its first successful mission, We Freed the Flowers (Mother's Day 2024). His writing and art have been published in venues including: the Marshall Project; Writing Class Radio; Mangoprism(2022); Study and Struggle Blog; NYU Center for Law, Equality, and Justice Annual Report (2023); and Intra Magazine Time Capsule edition cover(2023).
You can check out more of his art and writing on instagram @coreydevonarthur, @thebrooklynw.a.y. #freedtheflower and medium.com/@coreydevonarthur.
Corey Devon Arthur (#98A7146)
Otisville C.F. P.O. Box 8
Otisville, NY 10963
