The COG Art Group is an opportunity for an inmate to healthily and creatively express themselves to their peers and to the community beyond the walls of prison. We have several wonderful partners helping to make this possible.
The Aberdeen Recreational Cultural Center has graciously hosted an inmate art show for the past four years, allowing the inmates to showcase their talents and sell their arts and crafts. The Siouxland library has offered to support a statewide traveling inmate art show, bringing that same talent across the different communities around South Dakota. Any art that isn’t sold and is finished traveling is automatically donated to Family Connection, located in Sioux Falls.
Arts and crafts donated to the Family Connection are auctioned with proceeds going to help support their mission of offering affordable overnight housing for out of town families visiting incarcerated loved ones.
Each of these partners not only help promote the healing of inmates through creativity but also stimulate the community dialogue on prison reform and a felon’s reentry into society.
Currently, the Art Group needs a volunteer to come and teach art classes behind the walls and local artists presenting and showing the inmates what and how they create and how to continue their passion for art after they leave prison.