In the federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island, work was considered a privilege. One of the rewards for good behavior was a job, and for many inmates during the last two decades of the prison’s existence, that job was in the New Industries Building. Built between 1939 and 1941, this two-story laundry and manufacturing facility was designed to replace the Model Industries Building nearby, which had been the site of several escape attempts.
Working in “the Industries” offered its own kinds of escape: from boredom and physical inactivity, from social isolation, and even from a full prison term. In exchange for his labor, an inmate could earn a shortened sentence—an average of two days’ “good time” for a month’s work—as well as a little money to send to family or save for the future. (In the prison’s early days, the wage was five to twelve cents per hour.) Work could be a relief from the tedium of hours spent alone in a cell, and the daily walk down from the cellhouse to the New Industries Building offered panoramic views of San Francisco and the Golden Gate.
For some prisoners, though, the sight of the city was a tormenting reminder of how far they really were from freedom, and work, rather than a respite, was just another dreary routine. Former inmate Jim Quillen remembered his job in the New Industries brush shop as “the most frustrating and boring, not to mention aggravating, work I have ever done—before, during, or after my release from prison.” Although workers had slightly more freedom to move about and communicate at work than in the cellhouse, they were still under constant control: unarmed guards patrolled the floor, carrying whistles to signal to armed guards in the gun gallery overhead in case of trouble.
New Industries tailor shop, c. 1950s
Inmates sewing in the New Industries Building, c. 1939–1962
Construction of laundry shop, c. 1930–1940
Gun gallery, New Industries Building
Former guard Jim Albright described the New Industries Building as “filled with the assorted sounds of clothes washers and dryers, band saws, grinders, hammers, and sewing machines. . . . The combined scents of laundry detergent, cleaning fluids, and other chemicals once filled the air.” Workers here did laundry for military bases all over the Bay Area—initially, the entire upper floor was a laundry facility, the largest in San Francisco at the time—and manufactured clothing, gloves, shoes, brushes, and furniture for government use. During World War II, prisoners were also called upon to help the war effort: workers made tens of thousands of cargo nets for the U.S. Navy and repaired the large buoys that secured the submarine net across the Golden Gate.
The official employer of workers on Alcatraz was not the penitentiary itself but rather Federal Prison Industries, a government corporation launched in 1934 to create “factories with fences” in federal prisons. This corporation still exists today; operating under the name UNICOR, it has expanded to provide not only manual labor for government industry but also business services, such as prisoner-staffed call centers, for private companies. Currently, the United States is home to one of the world’s largest prison labor forces, while forced labor remains a horrific reality for prisoners of conscience in many parts of the world.
The workshops in the New Industries Building started shutting down in October 1962, before the entire prison closed in 1963. Today, visitors to the national park can still see the views that were so tantalizing for the men who worked here, and observe the numerous birds that now use the cliffs outside New Industries as a nesting ground.
Both delicate and fearsome, the traditional Chinese dragon kite embodies a mythical symbol of power. Ai Weiwei unfurls a spectacular contemporary version of this age-old art form inside the New Industries Building: a sculptural installation with an enormous dragon’s head and a body made up of smaller kites, some of which carry quotations from activists who have been imprisoned or exiled, including Nelson Mandela, Edward Snowden, and Ai himself. The swallow-shaped and hexagonal kites scattered throughout the room feature stylized renderings of birds and flowers—natural forms that allude to a stark human reality: many are symbols of nations with serious records of restricting their citizens’ human rights and civil liberties.
Ai’s studio collaborated with Chinese artisans to produce the handmade kites, reviving a craft with a diminishing presence in China. By confining the work inside a building once used for prison labor, the artist suggests powerful contradictions between freedom and restriction, creativity and repression, cultural pride and national shame. He also offers a poetic response to the multilayered nature of Alcatraz as a former penitentiary that is now an important bird habitat and a site of thriving gardens.
Individual prisoners of conscience from many of the countries referenced here are also represented in other artworks in the exhibition, including Trace in the adjacent room and Yours Truly in the Dining Hall. In addition to viewing the kite from floor level, visitors can observe it from above by entering the upper gun gallery that runs the length of the New Industries Building.
Ai Weiwei, With Wind, 2014 (detail); installation: handmade kites (paper, silk, and bamboo); part of @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, Alcatraz Island, 2014–2015
Ai Weiwei, With Wind, 2014 (detail); installation: handmade kites (paper, silk, and bamboo); part of @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, Alcatraz Island, 2014–2015
While With Wind uses natural and mythical imagery to reference the global reality of political detainment, Trace, an installation at the rear of the New Industries Building, gives that reality a human face—or, rather, many individual faces. The viewer is confronted with a field of colorful images laid out flat across the expansive floor: portraits of over 170 people from around the world who have been imprisoned or exiled due to their beliefs or affiliations, most of whom were still incarcerated as of June 2014.
If the sheer number of individuals represented is overwhelming, the impression is compounded by the intricacy of the work’s construction: each image was built by hand from LEGO bricks. The images of Chinese and Tibetan prisoners were assembled in the artist’s studio, while others were fabricated in San Francisco to the artist’s specifications. Assembling a multitude of small parts into a vast and complex whole, the work may bring to mind the relationship between the individual and the collective, a central dynamic in any society and a particularly charged one in contemporary China.
Like With Wind, this artwork may be viewed from the upper gun gallery as well as at floor level.
Ai Weiwei, Trace, 2014 (detail); installation: LEGO plastic bricks; part of @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, Alcatraz Island, 2014–2015
Andrei Barabanov
Russia
Convicted of attacking police and inciting mass riots, Barabanov is a graduate of the Moscow Mathematics College and an artist. He was involved in the March of the Millions demonstration in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square on May 6, 2012, when thousands of people held a protest on the eve of Vladimir Putin’s presidential inauguration. At some point a small group of demonstrators tried to stage a sit-down strike and police began to try to force them out of the square. Other protesters resisted the police action, and the demonstration quickly degenerated into a street riot. In February 2014 Barabanov was sentenced to three years and seven months in prison.
Naji Fateel
Bahrain
Charged by the Bahrain authorities with “setting up a terrorist group which aims to suspend the constitution and harm national unity,” Fateel is a Bahraini human rights activist and member of the board of directors of the NGO Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights (BYSHR). He was initially arrested following his participation in peaceful protests calling for democratic and human rights reforms in 2012. He has been imprisoned multiple times since 2007, has testified to being tortured, and has been the target of death threats. In 2013, he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
Gedhun Choekyi Nyima
China
On May 14, 1995, at age six, Nyima was named the 11th Panchen Lama by the 14th Dalai Lama. After his selection as the Dalai Lama’s successor, Nyima was detained by authorities of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Another child, Gyaincain Norbu, was later named as Panchen Lama by the PRC, a choice that exiles claim is rejected by most Tibetan Buddhists. Nyima has not been seen in public since May 17, 1995; his current whereabouts are unknown.
John Kiriakou
United States
On October 22, 2012, Kiriakou pleaded guilty to one charge of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by disclosing to a reporter the name of an agency officer who had been involved in the CIA’s program to hold and interrogate detainees. Kiriakou is a former CIA officer who worked as an agency analyst and counterterrorism official from 1990 to 2004. In December 2007 he publicly discussed the suffocation technique used in interrogations known as “waterboarding” and stated that this technique was approved by the Justice Department and National Security Council in 2002. He was also quoted as saying that waterboarding “was a policy decision that came down from the White House.” Supporters say he is being unfairly targeted for having been the first CIA official to publicly confirm and detail the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding. In 2012 he was awarded the Joe A. Callaway Award for Civic Courage. In January 2013 he was sentenced to thirty months in prison.
Omid Kokabee
Iran
Sentenced for “communicating with a hostile government [the U.S.]” and “illegitimate/illegal earnings,” Kokabee was an experimental laser physicist at the University of Texas at Austin who in January 2011 was arrested in Iran after returning from the United States for a family visit. In an open letter, he claimed that the Iranian authorities were trying to force him to assist in the country’s nuclear program by threatening him and his family. He is the co-recipient of the American Physical Society’s 2014 Andrei Sakharov Prize for “his courage in refusing to use his physics knowledge to work on projects that he deemed harmful to humanity in the face of extreme physical and psychological pressure.” He is currently serving a ten-year prison sentence.
Lolo
China
Tibetan singer Lolo was arrested on April 19, 2012, in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture and eventually sentenced to six years in prison. His crime was recording an album of fourteen songs that called for Tibet’s independence, unity of the Tibetan people, and the return to Tibet of the Dalai Lama. Soon after the album’s release in 2012, the thirty-year-old was arrested in eastern Tibet. He had no known links to protests or other activism. It is likely that he was charged with a catchall offense that allows the Chinese authorities to punish ethnic minorities defending their rights—and which carries penalties up to and including execution.
Eskinder Nega
Ethiopia
Convicted of treason, “outrages against the Constitution,” and “incitement to armed conspiracy,” Nega published an online column critical of the use of an anti-terrorism law to silence dissent and calling for the Ethiopian government to respect freedom of expression and end torture in the country’s prisons. His sentence was upheld in May 2013. In 2014 he was awarded the Golden Pen of Freedom, the annual press freedom prize of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA).
Agnes Uwimana Nkusi
Rwanda
Sentenced for defamation and threatening national security, Nkusi was the editor of the independent Kinyarwanda-language newspaper Umurabyo. Government authorities arrested her after she published opinion pieces criticizing government policies and alleging corruption in the run-up to the 2010 presidential elections. Previously, she was arrested and imprisoned after publishing an anonymous letter criticizing the government. Since April 2013 she has been serving a four-year prison sentence.
Oh Hae-won Suk-ja
South Korea
On December 8, 1995, Suk-ja’s father, Oh Kil-nam, moved his family to Pyongyang, North Korea, to work as an economist and so that his wife, Shin Suk-ja, could receive treatment for hepatitis. He requested political asylum in Denmark on his way to Germany. The following year Suk-ja, her mother, and her sister were imprisoned indefinitely, apparently because her father did not return to North Korea. Suk-ja is presumed to be alive and was last known to be incarcerated in Yodok Concentration Camp, northeast of Pyongyang.
Tạ Phong Tần
Vietnam
Charged with writing anti-state propaganda and “seriously affecting national security and the image of the country in the global arena,” Ta is a Vietnamese dissident blogger. A former policewoman, she was arrested for her blog posts alleging government corruption. Due to these online posts and her criticism on the Web about the policies of the Communist Party of Vietnam, she was expelled from the party and lost her job in 2006. In July 2012 her mother, Dang Thi Kim Lieng, self-immolated outside the Bac Lieu People’s Committee headquarters in protest of her daughter’s detention. In October 2012 Ta was sentenced to ten years in prison. The sentence was upheld on appeal in December 2012.
From the New Industries Building’s lower gun gallery, where armed guards once monitored prisoners at work, visitors peer through cracked and rusted windows to glimpse an enormous, multifaceted metal wing on the floor below. Its design is based on close observation of the structure of real bird’s wings, but in place of feathers, the artwork bristles with reflective metal panels originally used on Tibetan solar cookers.
Like With Wind on the floor above, Refraction uses imagery of flight to evoke the tension between freedom—be it physical, political, or creative—and confinement. The sculpture’s enormous bulk (weighing more than five tons) and position on the lower floor keep it earthbound, but one might imagine its array of solar panels silently mustering energy, preparing for takeoff.
By requiring visitors to view the work from the gun gallery, the installation implicates them in a complex structure of power and control. Following in the footsteps of prison guards, visitors are placed in a position of authority, and yet the narrowness of the space creates a visceral feeling of physical restriction.
Ai Weiwei, Refraction, 2014 (detail); installation: Tibetan solar panels, steel; part of @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, Alcatraz Island, 2014–2015
A worker prepares to attach a Tibetan solar panel to Refraction
Ai Weiwei, Refraction, 2014 (detail); installation: Tibetan solar panels, steel; part of @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, Alcatraz Island, 2014–2015
