Posted on October 21, 2026 by Emilie Amrein
Last spring, UTSA Arts brought together artists, writers, educators, students, and community partners for Arts & Incarceration, a citywide series exploring the many ways the arts intersect with incarceration.
Arts and incarceration
Last spring, UTSA Arts brought together artists, writers, educators, students, and community partners for Arts & Incarceration, a citywide series exploring the many ways the arts intersect with incarceration. The series invited San Antonio audiences to encounter incarceration through the perspectives and creative work of people who have experienced it. Through performances, writing workshops, conversations, professional development for teaching artists, and other public programs, the Arts & Incarceration series created opportunities for community to listen, reflect, make, and talk together about what the arts can reveal about lives and experiences that are often kept out of public view.
The series placed incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists at the center of these conversations. Their work offered more than testimony about the experience of incarceration; it offered ways of thinking about identity, belonging, memory, justice, and repair. This approach reflects UTSA Arts’ larger commitment to cultural participation, creating opportunities for people to contribute to the cultural life of San Antonio not simply as audiences, but as artists and knowledge-makers.
Texas has one of the largest and most expansive carceral systems in the country. Nationally, more than 1.8 million people were incarcerated in jails and prisons in 2024, with people of color continuing to experience incarceration at disproportionately high rates. These numbers offer a glimpse of the scale of the carceral system, but they cannot convey the human lives behind them. It is within that larger context that Arts & Incarceration asked what might become possible when those stories are heard through the arts.
One highlight was the presentation of poet and artist Reginald Dwayne Betts’ production of
Felon: An American Washi Tale at the Carver Community Cultural Center. Betts also spent time at Dominguez State Jail with members of the UT San Antonio Philosophy and Literature Circle. The series was made possible through partnerships with the Carver Community Cultural Center, Contemporary at Blue Star, the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, Gemini Ink, the Majestic-Empire Foundation, and the San Antonio Book Festival, whose collaboration helped bring the series to audiences across San Antonio. UTSA Arts is grateful to the Texas Commission for the Arts for its generous support of this work.
— Emilie Amrein
