NYC Health + Hospitals officials on April 17 unveiled a new mural by Dindga McCannon at Rikers Island, the 413-acre East River isle housing New York City’s largest jail. Titled Towards a Brighter Tomorrow!, 2024, the vibrantly hued work graces the exterior of the jail’s Reentry Service Center, through which visitors enter and released detainees exit. All parties are able to get naloxone kits and fentanyl test strips there, while departing incarcerated people may additionally obtain free smartphones.
The mural is the latest of thirty-seven created to date through NYC Health + Hospitals’ Community Mural Program and depicts a small group of individuals happily parading toward the jail’s exit and a community that waits to welcome them eagerly. Painted on the various objects they carry—bags, cell phones—and the mural’s border are elevating words and phrases like courage, family, resilience, hope, dreams, and friends. McCannon collaborated with patients in the NYC Health + Hospitals/Correctional Health Service to come up with the idea for the mural, which is meant to exude positivity. Following the work’s conception, under the artist’s guidance and that of her son, Harmarkhis McCannon, also an artist, many of the patients painted sections of the design.
Born in Harlem in 1947, the Philadelphia-based McCannon—who is additionally an author, illustrator, and costume designer—only recently gained wide acclaim for her portrait quilts and textile works, despite having been active for decades. “People always ask me where I have been this whole time,” she told Artforum’s Osman Can Yerebakan in 2021, on the occasion of her first-ever solo gallery show. “I’ve been here all along. Whether through painting or weaving, I’m interested in telling stories of Black women who refuse to take no for an answer, who push the limits of what’s possible.”
Educated at the Art Students League, where she studied under Jacob Lawrence, Al Loving, and Richard Mayhew, McCannon joined the Harlem-based Black artists’ collective Weusi in 1965. The group embraced African iconography: bold, vivid colors and patterns, and Black subject matter. In the 1970s, she cofounded the collective Where We At Black Women Artists Inc. alongside compatriots including Kay Brown, Gylbert Coker, and Faith Ringgold. (Ringgold, who died April 13 at the age of ninety-three, in 1971 contributed to Rikers Island the mural For the Women’s House, which occupied the Correctional Institution for Women for five decades before being moved to the Brooklyn Museum in 2022. Like McCannon, she too achieved recognition late in life, both women’s career trajectories having been stymied by racism and sexism.)
“It was wonderful collaborating on this mural with the patients of Rikers Island. It was them who suggested the positive uplifting theme of the mural, as well as enthusiastically helping to paint it,” said McCannon in a statement. “Being one of the last things one will see when released from Rikers, it will send the person leaving a note of positivity. Art is an amazing tool that every person should enjoy on some level. There is a lot of talent within these walls and I hope that it will continue to flourish.”
“We are so grateful to Dindga McCannon for creating a framework within which the shared experiences and emotions of our patients can be creatively expressed. The resulting work of art exemplifies our vision for a welcoming, patient-centered reentry center, and captures our belief in the positive, resilient human spirit,” said Patsy Yang, senior vice president for Correctional Health Services at NYC Health + Hospitals, in a statement. “We hope the mural will serve as a beacon of strength, hope, and optimism for every person who is released from Rikers.”
