The El Camino College Art Gallery hosted a reception for its latest exhibition, “Kieva Campbell: A Tribute to April Savino, the Sister I Never Met,” on Thursday, Feb. 26, from 1-7 p.m.
The exhibit, put on by the ECC Art Gallery, officially opened earlier that week on Monday, Feb. 23.
Singer Mahalia Jean-Pierre, who goes by the artist name YeYa, began the reception by performing original songs outside the gallery’s entrance before the doors opened to reception attendees.
“The Essence of Life,” a quilt by fiber artist Gary Tyler, is one of the first pieces attendees saw as they entered.
At 16 years old, Tyler was wrongfully accused of murder and was sentenced to death at Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana. After serving over 41 years in prison, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled his case unconstitutional.
Tyler’s artistic ambitions started while he was serving his sentence, when he participated in a hospice program for terminally ill inmates, where he made quilts.
“We didn’t only make quilts to support the program, but quilts were being made for the patients themselves,” Tyler said.
In reality, Tyler gathered his true quilting knowledge from watching his grandmother make quilts as a young boy. She would stuff them with mulch, newspapers, and rags.
In 2016, he was released at the age of 57.
“I had to reacclimate to knowing how to live independently…because you have an institution that generally provides you with the bare necessities,” Tyler said.
It has taken Tyler about a decade to get used to life after prison, but since then, he has written his first book, “Stitching Freedom,” about social injustices and racism in the system.
Fabian Debora’s “Love Letters,” curated by FIRST (Formerly Incarcerated Re-Entry Students Thriving) student Sophia Cervantes, is a portrait series of formerly incarcerated women and men of Los Angeles.
It was inspired by the love letters exchanged “to and from” loved ones, the Vincent Price Art Museum described.
“When you start to think about how they demonize the image of gang members, I started to realize that the most intimate and vulnerable moment one has in incarceration is when he’s writing a love letter,” Debora said.
Debora is currently working on chapter two of the Love Letter series, titled “Embracing the royalty of the migrant,” which focuses on the social injustices that are currently taking place in America.
“I feel very resonant with a lot of the artists here, as someone who deals with anxiety and mental health, I think a lot of people have natural responses to the world that we live in,” Cervantes said.
