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The Durham Morning Herald
Title: Brimming with 1,200 hats
Women suspend yarn to make a point
Date: September 4, 2003
Artist Sherri Wood knows the new exhibit at the Durham Art Guild might
make some people uncomfortable.Even if it is just soft, fuzzy hats
hanging from the ceiling.
The exhibit features 1,200 crocheted hats suspended by strands of
yarn. You're supposed to walk through it.
"It's uncomfortable because we're not used to touching art," Wood
said. "I think it's OK that it's uncomfortable."
The hats may be art, but they also are making a point. Plastic crochet
hooks were the only tools that inmates at the N.C. Correctional
Institution for Women were allowed to use unsupervised, Wood said.
The hats grew out of Wood's volunteer work at the prison. When she
suggested the women display their hats, the women, working with
community volunteers, set a goal of making 1,200, or one for each
offender at the women's institution.
Now the women are hoping to make another statement. They are using the
exhibit to rally support for Our Children's Place, a $3.5 million
project designed to let children live with their mothers during the
final months of their mothers' incarceration.
About 13 percent of North Carolina's female offenders are pregnant
when they go to prison, and more than 4 percent, or about 80 offenders
a year, deliver their babies behind bars, according to a project news
release. Supporters of Our Children's Place hope to build a facility
big enough for 20 women and 40 children. The mothers would participate
in parenting, vocational and drug treatment classes, and the children
would enroll in Early Head Start nursery and preschool programs or in
local elementary schools.
Also in the exhibit are 24 photographs of women modeling the hats.
From their pictures, you can't tell which of the women are inmates and
which are volunteers -- members of the United Church of Chapel Hill,
who, along with Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill and Yarns Etc. in
Carrboro, donated the yarn.
And that's the point, photographer Artie Dixon said.
Part of her intent as she photographed the women -- the inmates in a
cinderblock room across from the prison gym; the church volunteers in
her Chapel Hill studio -- was to show both groups working toward a
common goal: breaking the generational cycle of violence and crime.
"My plan and goal [was] to show the women without reference to their
surroundings," Dixon said. "In my opinion, children need their
mothers, no matter where they may be."
During the project, that generational cycle hit home for Wood.
One day, one of the inmates came in holding a purple hat with a white
band and a purple butterfly. Wood asked the woman about the hat, only
to find out that she had not made it. The woman's mother did -- a
mother she never knew until she joined her in prison, where the older
woman had been while her daughter was growing up.
"She had never been able to have a relationship with her mother until
she was incarcerated herself," Wood said. "There was the evidence
right there."
Go and Do
What: "1,200 Hats"
Who: Installation artist Sherri Wood and photographer Artie Dixon
When: Opening from 5 to 7 p.m. today
Where: The Durham Art Guild, 120 Morris St.
Cost: Free through Oct. 12.
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