Independence Community College Visual Art Professor J.D. McGuire was recently written about in a book titled Marking Time, Art in The Age of Mass Incarceration, authored by Rutgers Professor Nicole R. Fleetwood and published by Harvard Press.
Before coming to ICC, J.D. spent two years teaching an Art Appreciation class inside six New Jersey State Prisons. His curriculum, called “Contraband Scholars,” brought incarcerated art students from two facilities into conversation and collaboration. Lessons combined drawing exercises, writing prompts and analysis of readings and images about social justice, the history of racial captivity and mass incarceration.