The woman who teaches art to prisoners

By: Elsibe Loubser McGuffog

Interview conducted by Grade 11 learners, Lees, Leer en Leef Sentrum, Wellington

How to stay out of jail? Artist and academic Marieke Kruger offers hope to prisoners

Motivation is an individual matter. In the case of Marieke Kruger, motivation comes from God and prisoners.

In South African prisons, the statistics for recidivism (relapse into criminal behaviour) are high, among the highest in the world.

Prison systems worldwide have divergent success rates with rehabilitation, with the developed economies (the Global North) having a higher success rate. In countries like Norway, only 20% of formerly incarcerated people commit another crime within two years of release.

How those incarcerated in the Global South (underdeveloped economies) engage with the official rehabilitative model remains largely under-documented, according to a paper by Bianca Parry(Pretoria University).

Researchers in the Global North are also more actively involved in studying the accessibility of digital education for the incarcerated. But are qualifications enough?

A study done in 2023 by Anton Symkovych (University of Melbourne and Johannesburg), titled Narratives of Rehabilitation in a South African Prison, investigates the interplay between individual needs and personal aspirations against the backdrop of socio-economic reality.

Prisons are embracing rehabilitation efforts and good work is being done in South African prisons since the White Paper on Corrections in South Africa of 2004.

Education in the correctional environment is endorsed as an effective rehabilitative tool linked to reducing recidivism and improving reintegration into society, says Parry, and research into higher education in corrections has the potential to expand how interested parties (academics, stakeholders and policymakers) understand incarcerated students’ pathways towards education attainment.

But what about cutting to the chase and providing prisoners with a skill that is automatically a job?Not only a job but also a self-therapy?

This is the endeavour of Marieke Kruger, a lecturer at the Jack Meyer Art Centre in Paarl and an artist in her own right who is studying for her doctorate.

She has built her reputation on a project she established to teach prisoners fine art, which ran from 2015 to 2018 at Drakenstein Correctional Services (the old Viktor Verster prison).

It is a lifeline for these men. Art becomes their bridge into society. When they leave prison, they can continue with art as a career.

Some of her best students, such as Taswell Amon and Joseph Buys, assisted in the setting up of the Outsider printing workshops, which Marieke offered at the Breytenbach Centre in Wellington on Saturday mornings.

In 2025, her Outsider workshops will be shifting (providing there are enough Outsider artists who would like to participate) to her new studio space at Blignaut Park Industrial Complex (the old Glodina Towel factory) in Wellington.

Her other focus is a PhD, which is intricately connected to her work in prisons.

Marieke’s top student, Joseph Buys, passed away in August 2023 at his home in Calvinia. He was in his early 60s.

Marieke explains that he struggled with a hard life, difficult personal circumstances,and drug addiction as a result thereof for most of his life. 

“He, nevertheless, was one of my most committed and most talented printmakers, who hosted a solo show in Cape Town and collaborated with me on an exhibition at MOK outside Stellenbosch.”

It’s a challenge for prisoners to go back into society, acclimatising to regular life and selling art projects.

There is also the lure of crime. Marieke says that the biggest problem is the lack of family support and a safe and supportive environment for ex-prisoners to live in if they have not got any family support of their own.

Some succeed, such as Taswell Amon, a committed Christian, who is now married and writing his autobiography.

Marieke says that she has a dream of establishing a Halfway House (their own boarding house) in collaboration with the printmaking workshops with all of the accompanying support structures, which is what ex-prisoners would need towards successful integration back into society.

“We would need a great amount of sponsorship money in order for us to establish such a place, of course,” she says. She explains that they are still looking towards approaching different organisations for sponsorship and funding towards Outside Inside Prisoner Art (OIPA) Projects as well as her current practice-led PhD Research through UNISA.

She explains that art becomes a way for the men to heal. It compels them to reach into their own stories for inspiration. “I tell them that they are luckier than most people in that sense,” she explains, “because they have complex stories.”

The art also becomes a way for them to connect to family who have shunned them. It is emotionally safer for the family to meet a convict from whom they are estranged at the safe neutral ground of an art exhibition.

Marieke explains that this holds a restorative potential – a chance to mend broken relationships.

Marieke offers everyone in the prison an opportunity to participate, but gang leaders often make the decision for many of their followers.

“The men in my programme at the moment are individuals who have decided to not be in a gang,” Marieke says. These men become their own support group.

“Joseph was very passionate and committed in his art practice and supported and assisted in collaboration with his best friend and fellow artist, NeelanNaidoo, in our prison workshops which we started at Drakenstein Correctional Services in 2015,” she recounts.

“Many prison artists admired him, and he assisted me in also teaching them after hours in the cells when my workshops ended.”

Subsequently, Neelan Naidoo’s work also stood out. Marieke explains that he produced etching prints of a very good standard and has had a solo exhibition at the MOK gallery at Muratie Wine Estate in 2020 entitled "Fragmented Self".

At present, Neelan Naidoo is Marieke’s most talented student; he is serving his sentence in Pollsmoor Prison until the end of 2024.

The men also learn painting, which is “more complex” for them, Marieke says. Most of the exhibitions to date have been held in Boland and Cape Town.

If there are enough funds one day, Marieke hopes to enrol their prints under Additions at the Cape Town Art Fair. “The fairs are very expensive,” she explains, so funding is key.

Commenting on her unusual vocation, Marieke explains that her privileged upbringing on a farm probably made it natural for her to interact with the boys of farm labourers.

“For some reason, I like working with men,” she explains, “and I resonate with their stories since I have also suffered

emotional abuse. Also, I’m a risk-taker, I’m not a fearful person. I remember working in Joburg,(where I lived from 1996 to 2000) and walking down Rocky Street amidst gun shots.”

Marieke explains that her prison visits are highly controlled by the presence of wardens. “Prisons aren’t like they look in the movies.

Very few men are in solitary confinement. They live together in large dormitories of about 40.

About 20 men attend my workshops at once.” Stories about gangs and knives are true, and there are regulations for what type of materials they may use for art.

“I am prohibited from teaching them techniques that involve acids. Our style of printing uses dry-point etching. They do use needles and that is done under observation, especially monitoring that all the needles are handed back after class.”

She is grateful to the man, Bertie Fourie, who has been the liaison between herself and the prison from the start. Fourie is clearly supportive of the project, which has been running well in two prisons in the Paarl area.

He relates his experience in a video that has been shared on social media, saying that it is not only about art skills but also life skills, allowing prisoners to develop holistically by getting them to commit to something.

Fourie says that the programme has proven that these offenders have gone out on parole and "have not been in a position to come back to prison at all", since they are making the project a form of livelihood when they are outside prison.

It also allows the prisoners to stay busy so gangsterism and drug abuse are limited to such an extent that prisoners request to be transferred to art rooms where they can be together as a community doing their art.

Fourie explains further that the trend is that you can then show them rehabilitation. Prisons are overcrowded worldwide, but art gives these prisoners a chance to be free in their minds.

Fourie recounts that, usually, when you speak to a prisoner serving a long sentence, his mindset is negative, “but these men are not incarcerated in their minds”.

Marieke’s present challenge is ethical clearance for her doctorate. Art can heal and most people are familiar with art therapy, but for her studies, she has to split the role and enlist a qualified psychologist while she will focus the artistic skill.

“Art therapy actually does span both roles,” she says, but they are very different fields of study, so I am pleased I am forced to do it with a qualified person – that’s if all my paperwork is accepted; applying for ethical clearance is a mammoth task.

I am applying for high-risk ethical clearance from UNISA, which I hope to succeed in obtaining this year, in order to do the various research projects with a selection of prisoners with whom I currently work at Allandale prison in Paarl.”

This will lead her to a Practice-led PhD study in Visual Art, which is focussed on the therapeutic, advocative and transformative potential of visual arts towards the transformation of the self and the other. 

The title of her research is: Transformation of the Self and the Other in carceral space: An exploration of the empathic sublime through drawing.

All her work in prisons is done under the auspices of the Department of Correctional Services, Development and Care.

Her research will entail a theoretical aspect as well as a practical component, of which the practical will include exhibitions of prisoners’ work as well as experimental process work, which she hopes to do with a selection of prisoners in order to explore the transformative potential of unconscious content being brought to consciousness through the artmaking process.

If she does manage to complete her doctorate, it could mean that many more prisons in South Africa will able to use her programme, and many more prisoners will heal their trauma, restore relationships with family and friends outside prison, and be empowered with the potential of a career, status and earnings - and even reclaim their souls.

Marieke’s motivation is spiritual. “I think when God's love was poured into my heart, I was astounded at my feelings of empathy and an inexplicable attraction to those whom I otherwise would never even have imagined I would meet or mix within my lifetime,” she admits.

She goes on to recount her experience: “God truly loves those whom society rejects, and when we immerse ourselves in this love we open ourselves to be surprised, enriched and transformed by those we would never have expected.”

Marieke herself has had a great amount of emotional trauma and loss in her life. But that has not deterred her: “In retrospect, instead of it destroying me as a human being, it has made me stronger and resolute in my purpose.

The experience of trauma has tested and broken me but has also strengthened me as an individual and forced me to interrogate, re-assess and question my values, my assumed faith and what might be truly worth saving in this life.”

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.