On Thursday January 16th, 2025, we hosted a webinar that explored the importance of art creation in carceral settings, the challenges incarcerated artists face, and the ways different organizations are collaborating with these artists to help disseminate their work to a wider audience and preserve it for the long term. These are issues we also covered in our recent report, Preserving Their Stories: Making (and Sharing) Art Under Mass Incarceration, that was funded through the NEH. We include a link to the webinar recording below.

One of our panelists, Hannah Whelan, was unable to join us. Tragically, she lost her home in the fires in Los Angeles. At the beginning of the webinar we read a letter from Hannah that highlights both the precarity of art created in prison, its vital role in connecting those on the inside with their families on the outside, and the urgent need to digitize and preserve these outputs. With permission, we include the full text of Hannah’s letter:

Like many people in Los Angeles, last week I lost my home to the Eaton Fire, which, along with multiple other fires, continues to devastate Los Angeles. I wasn’t able to take anything treasured with me, including the archive of creative works I’ve been collecting over the past 18 years of my father’s incarceration, as well as everything he made and shared with me before his incarceration. As many loved ones know, these materials can mean everything.

During the past few years, my dad hand wrote a book, which he mailed me piece by piece. I cherished typing this up—dedicating time each week to sit down and commit to this ritual—and this book is now gone too, left unfinished. It is hard for me to understand why I didn’t immediately digitize it. But when building this collection with my father, I didn’t follow the same rules of preservation that my archival training and impulses might encourage. I was a daughter first, a loved one on the outside trying to carve out a really crucial space for communication and exchange to occur on our own terms–as father and daughter, as two humans understanding a complicated relationship that was determined to simply exist.

It is hard to comprehend that these things are gone, but things are never just things. Sometimes they are everything.

As many here know, loved ones spend so much time just trying to communicate, to facilitate proof of life, to reconcile difficult relationships, and to traverse our own tender reality of missing someone so deeply—of wanting so desperately to share physicality with them—that we often neglect (or even reject) the importance of digital preservation.

I wish I could be here with you all to learn from my co-panelists, to learn from the audience, and to talk about topics that mean the absolute world to me–including the complexities of digital preservation in exchanges already stripped of physicality. I hope I will get the opportunity in the future.

For now, please feel free to reach out to me in the future to talk, and please consider supporting incarcerated firefighters on the frontlines.

Hannah

With all that we learned with this project and the importance of cultivating, collecting, and archiving art from within prison facilities, we are planning to conduct further research to continue this work and further assist the many organizations and family and community members currently involved.

Please click here to access the recording of the NEH Preserving Their Stories webinar.