NEWS

November 12, 2007
Artist draws out talent of student inmates

Mitchellville, Ia. - The wind never lets up. It whips through the razor-wire fence that surrounds the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women, scattering leaves between the low, brick buildings that circle the campus. The evening is cold and quiet and, now that daylight-saving time has ended, surprisingly dark.

But way down at the end of the courtyard, Building 4 buzzes with activity. In a room just past the double set of security doors, nine prisoners in navy-blue jumpsuits stand behind easels. One, a gray-haired woman named Kathleen Tyler, uses a pastel crayon to add texture to the week's class project, a still life of five oranges on a puckered white dish towel.

"The trickiest part is capturing the light," she said.

Tyler, who has spent the last 30 years in prison on a murder charge, knows the peculiar challenges a still life can present. Tiny details take on huge importance. Mistakes can never be erased.

She comes to class every week, ever since it started three years ago, and has nothing but praise for her teacher, Mary Muller, who offers some tips to a student nearby.

"There's not enough money in the world to pay Mary," Tyler said.

"God brought her to us."

Muller wanted to be an artist ever since she was a girl in Michigan. She used to draw portraits of her high school teachers, transfer the images to mimeograph paper with "evil-smelling ink" and publish them in the school newspaper.

Later, she studied art at Principia College, a school for students of Christian Science in southern Illinois. After graduation, she moved to Des Moines and raised a family. Most of her energy went to her kids - five in 6 years - but she soon picked up her paints to earn extra income.

At her sister's suggestion, Muller pulled about 40 of her old paintings from storage and sold them in a show. She spent the profits on Christmas presents and had enough left over for art lessons. Soon she was back in the swing, studying with the Russian painters Dimitar Krustev and Robert Brackman, painting portraits at malls and festivals, and teaching watercolor classes at the Des Moines Art Center.

Muller, 73, still teaches at her home studio on Des Moines' north side and picks up commissions on the side. She has painted official portraits for former Govs. Terry Branstad and Tom Vilsack, and last week unveiled a portrait of the namesake donors at Planned Parenthood's new Elizabeth and David Kruidenier Center on Sixth Avenue. For that painting, Muller worked from recent and decades-old snapshots. "The eyes never change," she said.

It was through her local connections that she heard about Mitchellville. Two of her students volunteered at the 500-bed prison and told her about its mission to equip women with practical skills for their return to the community. One of the volunteers had even heard Tyler mention Muller's name long before she met her in person. Muller still doesn't know how Tyler knew her.

"This is the way life works," she said. "You get an idea here and an idea there, and suddenly they all come together."

So in March 2004, Muller rounded up donated art supplies, filled out paperwork and headed to her first class in Building 4.

At a table off to the side, Shobha Horstman opens her box of pastels. Every crayon is in its place, perfectly arranged in rainbow order.

For Horstman, who is in prison for child endangerment, art is one of the few aspects of her life she can control. She fusses with her drawings for hours, working the light and shadows.

When she finished a drawing of a stack of fuzzy towels, the image looked almost photographic. The first people who saw it thought she'd ripped it from a magazine. "Some staffers have come to my room and think I'm lying," she said. "They've even gotten out their flashlights to look at it."

Later, Horstman pulls out a snapshot of her 9-year-old son and explains how he went to see her artwork in a group show at Urbandale's Gloria Dei Lutheran Church.

"He said 'My mama can paint really good,' but wanted to know if I can paint anything besides fruit," she said with a smile. "It's been a long time since any of our families have felt proud of us."

Muller doesn't ask many questions.

Once in a while she'll ask prisoners when they expect to be released, but only to learn how much time she'll have with them. She figures the uglier aspects of their lives are none of her business. "It's so easy to dwell on the negative. It's in front of you all the time, but you have to keep your thoughts above that. My goal is to build skills for the future."

So she and fellow teacher Sue Sweitzer focus on the basics - perspective, proportion and technique.

Since many of the inmates have few financial resources and only minimal education, the teachers hope to give them a leg up if they're released. Not all of the prisoners have natural talent, but the teachers are determined to help the ones who do.

Muller pulls out a sketch a prisoner drew during one of her first classes in 2004. It's a flat image of two cats, framed by a basic pair of trees. Then she reveals a pastel the same woman drew this year, after a series of lessons and her release from prison. A blue ceramic pitcher sits on a table next to a napkin dappled by light. A few lemons look real enough to squeeze. The difference is remarkable.

The woman, Muller explains, now lives in Waterloo and works the night shift at a fast-food joint. She used to come to Muller's studio in Des Moines every Saturday until her car broke down.

The woman considered taking a bus every week but discovered it made too many stops. For a while, Muller placed an ad in the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier to help find a weekly carpool but is now helping the woman search for art classes in Waterloo.

"The real question is, 'How can we help people who have the opportunity to build on something within themselves?" Muller said.

Another student was referred to Muller's private classes by his drug-abuse counselor. He was making steady progress - until he hitched a ride to California. When he returned, Muller learned he had sold his $225 set of pastels to a pawn shop that required him to pay $30 every month until it was sold. She bought the pastels herself, gave them back to him and arranged to have him repay her with interest-free installments whenever he had enough to spare.

"They can't make a living with art right away. It's taken me years," she said. "But they can work at it."

Occasionally, Muller hears from people who don't think criminals deserve any special perks, including art classes.

During some chitchat with a woman at Office Depot, Muller was told, "Those people should be punished. Do you know they even let them watch TV?"

But officials at the Department of Corrections see things differently, especially since classes like Muller's are free. Volunteer teachers donate their time and often use materials gathered from community charities.

Patti Wachtendorf, a deputy warden at the Mitchellville facility, said elective programs like Muller's help with inmate discipline. "It really gives them an incentive to behave," she said.

Vocational offerings for the roughly 9,000 inmates in the Iowa prison system have expanded during the last few years, Wachtendorf said. At Mitchellville, women take classes about everything from quilting to office skills.

"It's a good outlet to focus their energies in a positive way, and it helps them build self-esteem," she said, adding that most of the criticism she hears targets facilities for men. "It's just a different mentality with women."

Clean-up time comes abruptly.

Muller and Sweitzer make a final round while students unclip their work from the easels, box up pastels and slip projects into folders. A guard arrives to escort the woman out to the blustery courtyard, but nobody leaves without a word of appreciation.

"I've never had students who are so grateful," Muller said. "Every one of them says thank you on the way out of class."

Rachel Rogers, who spent most of the evening in a corner facing away from the group, came to her first class two years ago. She prefers to draw from her imagination but this time took Muller's advice, layering highlights onto still-life oranges.

"Every once in a while I try to please her," joked Rogers, who's serving time for second-degree robbery.

Before packing up her supplies, Rogers adds one more thing.

"This class has taught me a lot, and my stuff improved 100 percent," she said. "Mary's really an amazing woman. She can teach anybody.

BACK TO NEWS PAGE