A new mural by the artist Dindga McCannon was unveiled today at Rikers Island, the notorious prison island in the East River that hosts New York City’s largest jail. The mural, titled Towards a Brighter Tomorrow! (2024), appears on the exterior wall of the Re-entry Service Center, where recently released individuals can pick up cellphones and naloxone on their way to freedom.
The mural depicts a group of people joyfully walking out of a prison building to rejoin their welcoming community while carrying bags labelled “resilience”, “job” and “family”. The scene is surrounded by sunshine, musical notes and flowers, with the words “self love”, “courage”, “hope” and “dreams” breaking chains along the edges.
McCannon created Towards a Brighter Tomorrow! in concert with her son, the artist Harmarkhis McCannon, and people incarcerated on the island—specifically, patients in therapeutic housing units for those with substance-use and mental-health issues. The work was commissioned by NYC Health + Hospitals/Correctional Health Service, which provides medical assistance to people imprisoned at Rikers; it is the latest of 37 murals painted at NYC Health + Hospitals sites in recent years.
“It was wonderful collaborating on this mural with the patients of Rikers Island,” McCannon said in a statement. “It was them who suggested the positive uplifting theme of the mural, as well as enthusiastically helping to paint it … There is a lot of talent within these walls, and I hope that it will continue to flourish.”
Dindga McCannon provides guidance to NYC Health + Hospitals/Correctional Health Services patients as they paint panels of the mural in January 2024 Photo: Nicole Levy
The 76-year-old artist, raised in Harlem and known for her textile works and found-object quilts, is a co-founder of the 1970s art collective Where We At Black Women Artists Inc. along with Kay Brown, Faith Ringgold and Gylbert Coker, among others. (Ringgold, who died last week at age 93, created her own Rikers mural in 1971; it was moved to the Brooklyn Museum in 2022.) Overlooked for decades, McCannon only received her first major solo show at a commercial gallery in 2021.
“We hope the mural will serve as a beacon of strength, hope and optimism for every person who is released from Rikers,” Patsy Yang, the senior vice president for correctional health services at NYC Health + Hospitals, said in a statement.
Rikers, with its reputation for violence and brutality, has been an embarrassment to the city for decades and is legally mandated to shut down in 2027, although it appears this deadline will not be met. Earlier this month, New York City agreed to pay a record $28m to the family of an incarcerated 18-year-old who suffered severe brain damage after attempting to hang himself in 2019 as several correctional officers watched without taking action.