Breaking down walls
exhibition at the smithsonian

Lily Yeh’s work with inmates at Graterford Prison in Philadelphia is currently being featured as part of an exhibition at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. Breaking Down Walls: Art as a Portal for the Incarcerated highlights the efforts of 2 artists, Lily and Emanuel Martinez, to create transformative experiences through art for inmates in carceral facilities. Recently, Lily visited the exhibition. She shares her account below.

Seeing Graterford Exhibition Together

We traveled to Washington, D.C. as a group to see the exhibition of the Graterford Prison Project presented by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. Our group included filmmaker Glenn Holsten; Luis “Suave” Gonzalez and El Sawyer, both formerly incarcerated at Graterford Prison; and Lu, Suave’s wife. The Graterford Prison Project was carried out by a small, committed team—Holsten, and artists Lily Yeh and Gerry Givnish—who visited the prison regularly over several years, building trust through sustained presence.

The exhibition was installed in the Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery, located within the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, the historic building that houses both the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.

To enter this building together carried weight. It is a place long associated with national memory, representation, and cultural authority. To see work created inside a maximum-security prison—work shaped by confinement, endurance, and imagination—held within these walls was quietly astonishing.

We arrived not simply as visitors, but as people bound by shared history—each carrying a different relationship to Graterford, and to one another.To enter this building together carried weight. It is a place long associated with national memory, representation, and cultural authority. To see work created inside a maximum-security prison—work shaped by confinement, endurance, and imagination—held within these walls was quietly astonishing.

Our group included Luis “Suave” Gonzalez and El Sawyer, both formerly incarcerated at Graterford Prison, Lu, Suave’s wife, and members of the artist team who had worked inside the prison over many years.

In the Gallery

The gallery itself was calm and restrained. Softly colored walls, carefully composed vitrines, video monitors playing quietly. Nothing felt sensationalized. Inside the cases were letters, poems, drawings, photographs—fragments of lives once lived under extreme control and isolation.

Suave stood beside his painting—the Campbell’s Soup can, layered with handwritten words and messages that carried urgency, wit, and defiance. He pointed to it proudly, explaining details to those around him. Nearby, El Sawyer stood watching video footage he had helped to create years earlier under the guidance of Glenn Holsten. He watched closely, quietly, taking it in.

To hear their voices recorded, to see their images and words presented with such care, was deeply moving. For Suave and El, it meant something even more profound: their experiences had not vanished into silence. They were being seen.

Yet alongside that recognition was a quiet sadness. As we moved through the exhibition, we were reminded that quite q few people we had worked with over the years, men whose faces appeared in the films, whose names lived in letters and memories, were no longer with us. Some had passed away. Others remained incarcerated. Their absence was palpable.

The exhibition held both presence and loss.

From the Gallery to the Archive

After spending time in the exhibition, we walked together to visit the Archives of American Art offices. The atmosphere shifted. The space was open, light-filled, and colorful; rooms well designed to serve various purposes, for display, research, discussion, and personal offices. One wall curved gently through a long space, its sweeping surface covered with images of artists whose papers are held in the collection, past and present. Faces, lives, legacies, layered together in one continuous arc. To my utter surprise, I found a picture of myself paining a mural on a ladder! 

We were brought into the storage areas—precious, climate-controlled rooms holding rows of archival boxes. Each box carried the weight of a life’s work.

Among these were my own paper files—years of correspondence, notes, sketches, and documents. The box containing Graterford project was opened. Folders lifted carefully.

And then Suave stopped.

The Poem

He had found a poem.

Written years earlier on a piece of yellow paper and sent to me in a letter from Graterford Prison, it was titled “Solitary Confinement.” He had written it while incarcerated, under conditions of unimaginable isolation. He had not expected to see it again.

When Suave began to read the poem aloud, the room grew very still.

Below is the poem as he wrote it.