Please join us on Thursday February 6 for an artist talk by Yusef Qualls-El

 

Yusef Qualls-El is an artist and writer whose work often focuses on the prison industrial complex and his experience as a juvenile lifer, sentenced at sixteen to mandatory life without the possibility of parole in the Michigan prison system. 

 

Qualls-El’s poetry and visual work has been presented at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Mike Kelley Mobile Homestead at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the College for Creative Studies, the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art, the Yale School of Art, the University of Michigan, and Michigan Radio, among others. His first collection of poems and drawings, Thoughts are Things (Free School Press), was published in 2016. Most recently, his work was included Making Art in Prison: Survival and Resistance (Hat & Beard Press, 2023) a survey of work from Michigan prisons organized by Janie Paul.