All posts by Jonathan Rajewski

122 James Dean Fuson

Artists,

Born 1976, Detroit / Lives in Macomb Regional Correctional Facility, New Haven, Michigan

The sun is out, the sky is blue, and people are committing suicide on a rainbow. Some hang by their necks from the fuschia inner arc while others jump or lay dead in the grass as a squirrel watches (Rainbow Drawing, 2014). The scale of the dead in relation to the rainbow is deliberate. “This is life,” writes James Dean Fuson, “A lot of times things seem to be fine but if you look closely, things are not fine.”

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104 Chris Riddell

Artists, ,


Born 1970, Rochester MI / BA, Wayne State University / Lives in Hamtramck, MI

Chris Riddell uses dead rats as stencils. He makes sculptures that are also weapons, uses rotting ham and head cheese, the aural de/crescendoing of a squeaking wooden armchair, and the scent of lavender as material. He arranges sardines on auto grease and laundry detergent, constructs installations of armless, timeworn statuettes and found, fire-burned family photographs, tangles deflated sex dolls in plastic waste, and sets the mummified dead rat he stenciled with on a 2×4. All of it, everything you got, anything that’s around. His studio is all places and directions, centrifugal and multiplicitous. Smells and phonic material are there too, stinking and dripping and putrescent.
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98 Yusef Qualls-El

Artists,

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Born Detroit, 1979 / Lives in Macomb Regional Correctional Facility, New Haven, Michigan

In 1996, when Yusef Qualls-El was sixteen years old, a Wayne County judge sentenced him to mandatory life without the possibility of parole in the Michigan prison system. Though his original sentence has since been ruled unconstitutional—a violation of the Eighth Amendment—he remains incarcerated, one of hundreds of juvenile lifers awaiting re-sentencing in Michigan. As Qualls-El puts it, “they threw away the key.”

Qualls-El was born in Detroit in 1979 and moved from neighborhood to neighborhood with his family before ending up on the city’s east side. He grew up watching morning syndications of Merrie Melodies cartoons and learned how to draw them; Bugs Bunny, Foghorn Leghorn, Marvin the Martian, and Yosemite Sam were all part of his self-blossomed art education. Drawing cars, often flying ones, was a recurrent pastime; their unfettered mobility represented “ultimate freedom” for him. A few years later, Qualls-El would be sentenced to mandatory life without parole for being involved—as a driver, not the shooter—in a homicide that would change the entire course of his life.

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New writer – Jonathan Rajewski

Writers

Jonathan Rajewski is an artist and writer. He received a BA in Philosophy from Michigan State University and is a 2021 MFA Candidate in Painting at the Yale School of Art. Select exhibitions include Marlborough (New York), Jack Hanley (New York) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. His writing has appeared in Mousse Magazine, The Exhibitionist (MIT Press), and Essay’d. He is the co-founder of the Hamtramck Free School and co-facilitates writing and visual art workshops in prisons throughout Michigan. He lives between Hamtramck, Michigan and New Haven, Connecticut.