The photograph shows trees silhouetted against the night sky, with a simple handwritten caption: "It has been 25 years since I have seen the stars in the open sky!" This is part of The Night Sky Series by Robin Paris, Tom Williams and Harold Wayne Nichols. Paris and Williams are both art teachers. Nichols is on death row; he really hasn't seen the sky for 25 years.
Tennessee's Riverbend Maximum Security Institution houses 79 prisoners on death row, 11 of whom have collaborated with artists from the local Watkins College of Art for the project Unit 2 (part 1), currently showing at Nashville's Coop gallery. The Night Sky is described as a "surrogate" piece, the result of a prisoner asking artists to go out and capture an experience that is forbidden to them: a library full of books, a hearty breakfast prepared to precise specifications, a family portrait. Others are "add on" works, visual exchanges of drawings and text arising directly from the prison sessions. Donald Middlebrooks's "add on", Detroit Rebuilt: The Spirit Never Dies, contains an aspiration of hope and rejuvenation for a crumbling metropolis in its portrayal of two garages, one photographed, the other drawn. He says the project proves that he and his fellow prisoners "are more than that five minutes of time in our lives where we messed up".
