Meet Our 2024 Convening Featured Artists and Authors
This year’s 2024 Annual Convening were in for a special treat. We had the pleasure of partnering with directly impacted artists and authors to spotlight their work with our Clean Slate community, and we’re honored to be able to feature them here.
Eduardo Ramirez
Eduardo Ramirez is a Philly-born & bred creative. From his early days as a graffiti writer to the hard grind as a prison muralist, he has maintained the consistent approach of creating for himself and offering it to the world for reinterpretation and appropriate reappropriation. His art starts as his but it ultimately becomes yours, which in turn makes it ours.
A casualty of the criminal injustice system, Eddie spent almost 28 years in prison for crimes he did not commit. Through hard work and diligence, and with the assistance of a determined legal team and persistent family, Eddie was vindicated in November of 2023 when he was returned to his loved ones.
He has returned to Philly, where he’s assembling a team to examine and correct wrongful convictions.
For more information, please contact Eddie at ramirezeduardo1176@gmail.com or find him on instagram@76concepts.
Halim Flowers
At 16, Halim Flowers was charged as an adult for being an accomplice to a felony murder in Washington, D.C., a case documented in the Emmy-winning film "Thug Life In DC." Convicted and sentenced to 40 years to life, he discovered a passion for literature and the arts during his incarceration. Inspired by his friend Momolu Stewart, Flowers transitioned from freestyle rapping to writing poetry, which helped him express the trauma of growing up during the Crack era in D.C.
In 2005, Flowers founded SATO Communications (Struggle Against The Odds), publishing eleven books on poetry, self-help, financial literacy, and his memoir "Makings of a Menace, Contrition of a Man." His entrepreneurial spirit, rooted in his early life on the streets, drove him to share his message of love and resilience.
Released after 22 years on March 21, 2019, Flowers has since worked with Kim Kardashian on her documentary "The Justice Project," performed spoken word with Kanye West, received fellowships from Halcyon Arts Lab and Echoing Green, and spoken at universities and conferences nationwide. He advocates for the transformative power of the arts and entrepreneurship in addressing the criminal justice system.
Mark Loughney
Mark Loughney is a draftsman, painter, and PA native. His series of unconventional drawings were initiated during late-night hours within the confines of a prison cell. The spontaneous flow of thoughts during these challenging periods resulted in compelling outcomes that continue to influence both his drawings and paintings. Mark’s portrait project, titled Pyrrhic Defeat: A Visual Study Of Mass Incarceration, debuted at MoMa PS1 in the award-winning exhibition Marking Time: Art In The Age Of Mass Incarceration.
In the next chapter of Pyrrhic Defeat: A Visual Study of Mass Incarceration, Mark will draw 800 portraits of people who support changes to the criminal justice system. This series continuation will be exhibited alongside the original 771 portraits of incarcerated individuals.
His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Forbes, ArtForum, The Paris Review, Hyperallergic, and NPR, among many other media outlets.
Chris Wilson
Chris Wilson is an artist who works to raise the collective consciousness, not only through images that are bright and beautiful, but through a real confrontation of what it means to be human and make mistakes, even terrible ones. He has built a successful career in the arts, displaying his work in galleries, exhibitions, and museums nationally and internationally. Most recently, he auctioned off his work, “That’s It!”, at Sotheby’s. He knows, however, that for many artists working today, the art world is impenetrable; reserved for the educated, the elite. How does an artist navigate this atlas of privilege, particularly emerging and even established artists of color? As an artist, Chris’ practice—just like his life—is rooted in being of service. For Chris, the critical conversation is one that centers on how artists can transcend the barriers of power and privilege to successfully build a career in the arts.
Growing up in a tough Washington, D.C., neighborhood, Chris Wilson was so afraid for his life he wouldn't leave the house without a gun. One night, defending himself, he killed a man. At eighteen, he was sentenced to life in prison with no hope of parole.
But what should have been the end of his story became the beginning. Deciding to make something of his life, Chris embarked on a journey of self-improvement--reading, working out, learning languages, even starting a business. He wrote his Master Plan: a list of all he expected to accomplish or acquire. He worked his plan every day for years, and in his mid-thirties he did the impossible: he convinced a judge to reduce his sentence and became a free man. Today Chris is a successful social entrepreneur who employs returning citizens; a mentor; and a public speaker. He is the embodiment of second chances, and this is his unforgettable story.
Dorsey Nunn
When Dorsey Nunn shuffled, shackled like a slave, into the California State carceral system at age nineteen, he could barely read. While caged he received an education he never could have anticipated. His first lesson: Prison had a color scheme, and it didn’t match the larger society. On the inside, guards stoked racial warfare among prisoners while on the outside the machinery of the criminal legal system increasingly targeted poor Black and Brown communities with offenses, real or contrived. Nunn emerged from San Quentin after ten years behind bars, radicalized by his experience and emboldened by the militant wisdom of the men he met there. He poured his heart and mind into liberating all those he left behind, building a nationwide movement to restore justice to millions of system-impacted Americans.
In this poignant, wry, and powerful memoir, Nunn links the politics of Black Power to the movements for Black lives and dignified reentry today. His story underscores the power of coalition building, persistence in the face of backlash, and the importance of centering the voices of experience in the fight for freedom—and proves, once and for all, that jailbirds can fly.
Lenore Anderson
A former punk drummer turned prosecutor, Lenore Anderson is the founder and president of the Alliance for Safety and Justice. She is a former chief of policy at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, former director of public safety for the Oakland mayor, and the recipient of a James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award and a Frank Carrington Crime Victim Attorney Award. The author of In Their Names (The New Press), she lives in Oakland, California.
In Their Names busts open the public safety myth that uses victims’ rights to perpetuate mass incarceration, and offers a formula for what would actually make us safe, from the widely respected head of Alliance for Safety and Justice
“The fact that decades of increased investments in criminal justice have been justified in service of protecting victims of crime, when most crime victims haven’t seen the justice system offer any real protection or help, is perhaps the most sinister aspect and irony of mass incarceration.” —from the introduction by Lenore Anderson
When twenty-six-year-old recent college graduate Aswad Thomas was days away from starting a professional basketball career in 2009, he was shot twice while buying juice at a convenience store. The trauma left him in excruciating pain, with mounting medical debt, and struggling to cope with deep anxiety and fear. That was the same year the national incarceration rate peaked. Yet, despite thousands of new tough-on-crime policies and billions of new dollars pumped into “justice,” Aswad never received victim compensation, support, or even basic levels of concern. In the name of victims, justice bureaucracies ballooned while most victims remained on their own.
In In Their Names, Lenore Anderson, president of one of the nation’s largest reform advocacy organizations, offers a close look at how the political call to help victims in the 1980s morphed into a demand for bigger bureaucracies and more incarceration, and cemented the long- standing chasm that exists between most victims and the justice system. She argues that the powerful myth that mass incarceration benefits victims obscures recognition of what most victims actually need, including addressing trauma, which is a leading cause of subsequent violent crime.
A solutions-oriented, paradigm-shifting book, In Their Names argues persuasively for closing the gap between our public safety systems and crime survivors.