How friendship became a lifeline for a trans artist in prison

As an artist, 66-year-old Jamie Diaz straddles several worlds of marginalization.

As a trans woman, her work is less likely to receive the notice and acclaim garnered by her cisgender peers. As an incarcerated artist, prison rules mount higher hurdles to even expressing her creativity. Sharing her art with the outside world poses even greater challenges.

People behind bars have long created art–to express themselves, to remember their lives outside prison walls, to soar past the despairs of incarceration and to remind themselves and viewers that they are more than their most harmful decisions. Sometimes their work reaches a limited audience, but their viewers are most often confined to immediate family and friends.

Recent years have seen an increased public interest in prison art, notably Nicole Fleetwood’s “Marking Time” rocking the Museum of Modern Art/PS1 and Jesse Krimes’ meteoric rise into the art world even before his release from prison. But just as art by LGBTQIA+ people remains largely overlooked and marginalized, works by incarcerated LGBTQIA+ artists—particularly incarcerated trans women—rarely find a place in this new spotlight.

As an incarcerated trans woman, especially one confined in a small Texas prison town, the chances that Jamie’s work would not only be viewed by a wider audience, but receive a solo show in a major New York City gallery are nearly nil. Yet Jamie has done just that. The documentary Love, Jamie chronicles not only her journey through the innumerable odds stacked against her, but also is a powerful testament to community and friendship.

Creating art not only challenges prison efforts to dehumanize its occupants, but can also build a bridge between those inside and outside prison walls.

In 2013, Jamie Diaz wrote a letter to Black & Pink, a group that supports LGBTQIA+ people behind bars. Volunteer Gabriel Joffe opened her letter, and, amazed by her art, wrote back. That sparked a friendship that has only deepened over a decade.

Theirs is not a one-way friendship. Gabriel recounted that, when they first connected with Jamie, they were in their early 20s and navigating constant transphobic harassment. Jamie, nearly twice their age, became a confidante who shared her own experiences of growing up trans during the 1960s. “We were able to build up an intimacy that I don’t have with some people that I know in person,” Gabriel recalled.

Their friendship has also been a lifeline for Jamie. Across the country, transphobic policies and individual biases frequently exclude trans people from education, housing, employment, health care and other opportunities as well as harassment and violence in public. They are also disproportionately criminalized and incarcerated. One study found that 15 percent, or nearly one in six, trans people had been incarcerated at some point in their lives.¹ That disproportionate rate is even higher for trans people of color.

Many states place trans women in male prisons—and Texas is no exception. As a trans woman in a men’s prison, Jamie was at constant risk of sexual harassment, abuse and assault by both other incarcerated people and staff. Across the country, trans people are nine times more likely to be harassed or assaulted while behind bars.

And assault is not the only injustice she faces behind bars. One pencil-drawn comic shows a guard writing her a disciplinary report, or a ticket that could lead to further punishment, for an “extreme hair style.” Sadly, that punishment is not an anomaly—queer and trans people often face prison sanctions for expressing their gender identity, a punishment that is not meted out to their cisgender counterparts.

Another comic illustrates life in solitary confinement—where she is locked in a tiny cell for more than 22 hours each day. It’s a placement ostensibly to protect her from harassment and violence, but the extreme isolation has been proven to cause lasting mental, physical and emotional damage. Her experience is far from unique—a survey of 280 trans people imprisoned in 31 states found that nearly 90 percent had, at some point, been placed in solitary. For many, that was the prison’s only solution to separating them from people who threatened them.

Love, Jamie weaves in these dismal realities and the many obstacles that prisons employ to stifle creativity with Jamie Diaz’s ingenuity towards reaching her goal—to build the largest collection of queer art in the world.

Not the largest collection of prison queer art, but the world’s largest collection of queer art. Period.

While she has spent nearly three decades behind bars, Jamie makes it clear that incarceration does not define her life—or her art. “If I come out, I will no longer paint any artwork related to prison life,” she says, her voice half-muffled through the prison phone line. Even behind bars, much of her art soars above the everyday banality and brutality behind prison walls.

Few prisons offer programs that foster creativity even though people who take part in such programs are far less likely to recidivate, or end up behind bars again. Instead, prisons stifle creativity—both through their restrictions on materials and the violence and chaos that can—and often do—cause hopelessness. To circumvent the first, Jamie fashioned paint brushes from human hair, snagged white paint leftover from prison maintenance projects and used found materials, like sparrow feathers from the prison yard, to accentuate her work.

Such resourcefulness comes with the risk of further punishment. Prison rules prohibit altering items, which can include combining hair and other objects to create brushes, or owning scavenged supplies, like the paint and sparrow feathers Jamie used in her paintings. Should guards find either of those during a cell search, they can—and often do—hand out additional punishments. Those sanctions might include losing phone calls, recreation (or the scant hour or two they’re allowed out of their cell) and/or the ability to buy items at the commissary. Those losses might last weeks; sometimes they can last several months.

But for Jamie Diaz and many other artists, the desire to create, especially in such a bleak environment, outweighs the potential retributions. Creating art counters the despair caused by the constant prison strife, violence and chaos. “You wouldn’t believe all the things I think about when I’m working on my art,” Jamie reflected.

“I go all over the world in my mind. Sometimes I even think I go to other worlds.”

Prison regulations also limit how much a person can keep in their cell. Searches by guards can—and frequently do—damage their few possessions. Those searches can also lead to confiscation of prohibited items, including an artist’s makeshift or repurposed art supplies.

To ensure their safety, each time Jamie finished a piece, she mailed it to Gabriel. They have kept everything—letters illustrated with colorful drawings, comics created with prison-issued pencils, colorful cards, portraits, still lives, surreal and fantastic paintings of queer and trans women, darker prison iconography shaded with ballpoint pens. They also created a website to showcase her work to a broader audience.

That friendship—and Gabriel’s dedication to sharing her work-led to Jamie’s first solo gallery exhibition in New York City, a milestone that very few artists, and even fewer incarcerated artists, let alone Mexican-American trans artists buried deep in Central Texas, ever achieve. One year later, Jamie just reached another milestone—she was granted parole. Gabriel picked her up in the prison parking lot and, soon after, the two attended Jamie’s first Pride as an out trans woman. The pair plan to find a large house that allow both to maintain separate living spaces and for Jamie to have her own art studio—one that enables her to freely collect materials, create art and finally experiment with media, such as oil paints and large canvases, that were forbidden in prison.

For the first time, she will have her own living space where she has full control over when she wakes, sleeps, eats and creates—and the support of a trusted friend as she navigates freedom and a world that has dramatically changed after nearly three decades.

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¹ Page 44: https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/resources/NTDS_Report.pdf