![](https://intranet.americansforthearts.org/sites/default/files/styles/square_150/public/pictures/picture-18851-1554824161.jpg?itok=K0oHXqA0)
Dr. Lauren Neefe
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Kate McLeod
Teaching the Arts in a State Prison Classroom
Posted by Apr 09, 2019
![](https://intranet.americansforthearts.org/sites/default/files/styles/square_150/public/pictures/picture-18851-1554824161.jpg?itok=K0oHXqA0)
Dr. Lauren Neefe
![](https://intranet.americansforthearts.org/sites/default/files/styles/square_150/public/pictures/picture-9096-1501528847.jpg?itok=HiykF87J)
Kate McLeod
During this past school year, Dr. Lauren Neefe with Common Good Atlanta reached out to the High Museum to do a guest lecture experience at Metro Reentry Facility, a state prison reentry program in Atlanta. We came to one class during a series of art and art history lectures at the facility. This blog post features Dr. Neefe’s experience with incorporating art from the High Museum and music in her curriculum.
Last fall, as the volunteer site director for Common Good Atlanta’s education program at Metro Reentry Facility, the newly reopened and “re-missioned” state prison in southeast Atlanta, I was given the opportunity to give a series of lectures on art and art history to the 28 incarcerated students in our college course. My doctoral training is in English literature and poetry, not art history; but I knew I was up to the task of introducing art as a contested category of culture and knowledge. Maybe I could reframe the obligations of punitive discipline as the pleasures of an aesthetic one. Maybe the students and I could write over the indignities of one kind of suffering with the dignity of another, the kind artists and scholars know as passion.
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