The transformative potential of art to empower incarcerated youth.
This week we welcome Jacob and Max Cohen, two artist brothers who devote a great deal of their time and creative energy to helping others. Since 2023, the two have run a music and art program at Crossroads Juvenile Center, a secure detention facility in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.
Jacob is a Brooklyn-based experimental cellist, instrument maker, visual artist and educator. His unique style of cello improvisation grew out of his days as a street performer in New York City. He began creating homemade cellos after seeing a street performer play a tin can banjo. From 2014 to 2018 he ran a music program for youth incarcerated at Rikers Island.
Max has a background in illustration and animation. He has a decade of experience running public art programming for children and adults through the Art Students League, Albany Public Schools, NYC public school after-school programs, the NYC Parks Department, Mount Sinai Hospital, Rikers Island and now at Crossroads Juvenile Center. His past work includes hand-drawn animations that have been curated into programming around the world, and multiple documentary films about incarcerated young people in New York City.
This past November, while attending a convening for leaders of social impact organizations called OC (Opportunity Collaboration) I met an attendee representing World Connect, an organization that invests in new leaders and ideas. Their NYC team lead invited me to preview an exhibition of Max and Jacob’s recent project, a comic book called Dr. Octo and the Fate of the Universe, made with teens incarcerated at Crossroads who are part of the Art Club founded by Max and Jacob. I learned about the profound impact that this art project had on the participants as a team-building exercise, and the significance of the act of image-making by hand when one is denied access to any other means: No phones, no selfies, no photography, no screens. Suddenly, in the confines of a detention center, drawing again took on a significance akin to the role it had before the invention of photography.
I asked Max and Jacob to share some thoughts on their practice, the Dr. Octo project and the past exhibition.
Nitin: Could you give us a little background of your work as a team, and how you arrived at the Brownsville facility to set up the Crossroads Art Club?
Jacob: Max and I over the years have conducted free expression workshops within various institutional settings such as schools, hospitals, orphanages, and correctional facilities. Our workshops focus on encouraging people to use art as a means for self-expression and empowerment through spontaneous improvised group collaboration. In 2014, I connected to a nonprofit that was serving youth ages 16-21 that were incarcerated in pretrial detention at the infamous Rikers Island. From 2014-2018 I ran a music and art program at Rikers where I would carry my cello from housing unit to housing unit doing performances in the dayroom. The jail is almost entirely made from cinderblock style concrete and the acoustic cello sounds would reverberate through the building. The beautiful sound would soothe the people there and my program became very popular among both the incarcerated youth and the facility staff. At times the units would be too chaotic to play the cello, so I began to sketch life drawings of what I was seeing. No photographs or video are allowed inside the facility, but drawing was not an issue. I could draw images of daily life in the notorious jail and I was allowed to sketch portraits of the young people I encountered. I ended up drawing over 600 life drawings during my time there, which were displayed at the Queens Museum in 2018.
Fast forward to October 2023. I was invited to perform at an event about the intersection of incarceration and homelessness among NYC youth. I played one of my self-made electric cellos and had a slideshow of a selection of my drawings from Rikers projected behind me. After the performance was finished I was approached by the Deputy Commissioner for the Administration for Children’s Services who is in charge of the juvenile detention centers in New York City. She invited me in to do a performance for the youth in pretrial detention at Crossroads Juvenile Center in Brownsville. Crossroads is one of two high security juvenile detention centers in NYC, serving youth ages 12-21. The 16-21 age group I was working with on Rikers Island was moved to the juvenile system after the Raise the Age law was passed in 2017, which raised the age of criminal responsibility to 18 in New York. I asked if I could bring my brother Max to join me in the facility. We went together for the first session where we visited several housing units and got a chance to draw and play music with the youth. After a successful first day we decided to make it a weekly program. We consistently return every week to work with the youth in order to develop an artistic practice that we hope will give them something to focus on during their often decades-long bids. This is how we started the Crossroads Art Club.
We began to meet every week for 3-4 hours of uninterrupted communal studio time. We bring various art supplies and spread them out on a table and invite the youth to choose what they want to work on while I play live music for the group. We encourage them to develop their artistic practice both during the group sessions and during their free time on the units. We are one of the few programs that is allowed to mix boys and girls together. The group goes through periods where we are all working independently, and then from time to time a larger project will emerge that requires us to work together. The comic book Dr. Octo and the Fate of the Universe was one of the spontaneous projects that started as a collaboration between two of our youth.
Nitin: What was the initial spark for the comic book project?
Max: The comic book project was started by Travis and Jamal, two longtime members of Art Club. Travis kept developing short narratives in his own time in his room, each one channeling different aspects of the manga that inspired him. He’d bring them to the art club and show them to everyone. Jamal was focused on developing his drawing technique, practicing the finesse of his line. The two of them began to collaborate, producing short narratives together and thinking about a more ambitious work. Max had the idea of bringing in Japanese comic book paper, with light blue print trim lines and other indicators of professionalism. They loved this paper, the implications of seriousness, and immediately began to produce an incredibly ambitious work. We asked them if they wanted to make something about being young and in jail, but they felt that they spent enough time thinking about where they were and wanted to do science fiction instead.
Originally they wanted to make the story 4-5 pages long. Enough to print a real booklet, but short enough to finish without too much time. We lightly encouraged them to keep the drawings in black and white to help them finish their first-ever attempt at something like this quickly. Travis began to color it anyway because it looked too good. We supported his ambitions, and began to help them with the coloring while the two of them continued to do the pencil work and inking. It became clear that the project was going to require a lot more time than the Art Club group would allow, so we began to go to the facility a second evening every week to work with the two of them alone on it. The building leadership and staff were incredibly supportive, making space for us to be there and providing staff to oversee these extra sessions.
At around the sixth page of the comic Travis was sentenced and sent to prison upstate. We knew the project had to continue, and that it couldn’t finish without more help, so we began to recruit other art club members to participate. Some were there for every session to help, others dropped in occasionally between their own projects. No matter how many of them were part of it, as the project grew in scope and ambition, it became clear we needed even more help.
That was when the staff began to help. The youth development specialists who spend every day on the halls, operations managers, tour commanders, kitchen staff and the building leadership all made invaluable contributions to coloring in enormous segments of the work. It went from being a project by some of the kids to a community event, with people from all roles across the institution helping to create this artwork. What was originally intended to be a five-page project became a full-length comic, with 24 distinct pages, all composed and drawn by hand. One year after Travis and Jamal had begun, the project was finished. To celebrate we got permission to bring in a feast of Chinese takeout and the youth and staff who were there that day had a great party.
Nitin: Can you tell us about the impact on the kids and the culmination of the finished comic, its production, distribution and the exhibition?
Max: Once the drawing and coloring was complete we took it to a friend who is a professional printer and a comic book artist himself named Sergio Gusella at Print Garage in Williamsburg. He did an incredible job making the final product feel professional and beautiful. The smile on Jamal’s face the first time he held it in his hands is a memory we will hold on to for the rest of our lives. Seeing multiple staff members dance for joy when they saw their names in the credits also was wonderful. It was amazing to see how Jamal was celebrated by the community as the leader of this project in the building. Other youth and the staff venerated him for this achievement. It was beautiful for us to watch his sense of self transform to incorporate his artistry, despite the other pressures bearing down on him and his peers from being incarcerated. We are proud of all of them.
ACS [The New York City Administration for Children’s Services] arranged a one-day event for us to show the work at the Church of the Incarnation at 209 Madison Ave. Rev. Dannhauser and her community were generous with their beautiful space and time to allow us to show something beautiful that had come out of a complicated and difficult circumstance. We had a great turnout, including a prosecutor and judge who came and got to enjoy the work and talk to us about the young people at Crossroads. The success of this show encouraged us to look for a space to do a longer installation, which we found and did in December in the East Village. That show was great, and we got a lot of wonderful letters from the public to bring back to the young people inside the jail to further encourage them. In total we have distributed over 700 copies of the comic book both inside the jail and in public through various channels.
Nitin: What were some of the challenges and obstacles you faced to realize such an ambitious project and what kind of support did you get?
Max: The challenges of working with young people in detention are many. They are all facing serious legal proceedings and are naturally very stressed. The daily rhythm of the building is rightfully focused first on safety for everyone, so it is important to be patient with the institution at every step. That said, we got immense support from all corners of the building and were able to really commit to completing such an ambitious project without worrying too much about whether we’d be severely interrupted. This is a testament to the professionalism of everyone there that we have gotten to work alongside to help these young people.
Nina Watkins at NYC Connect was a great help both by funding the work so that we could dedicate more of our time to being inside of the facility, and instrumental in connecting us to Barbara Anderson at Art on the Ave to allow us to have a gallery installation of large-format prints of the comic to help us reach more people and make new connections to support where we’d like to take Art Club next. We are looking forward to trying to bring in more guest artists in the coming year to join us, and hoping to expand our own involvement inside to include more of the building and young people. ACS Deputy Commissioner Nancy Ginsburg has been our foundation of support for this entire effort, the person who saw the possibility, invited us inside, and has, along with her colleagues across ACS, made what we’ve done with the youth possible. As mentioned earlier, Sergio Gusella at Print Garage is the reason the comic is such a beautiful object. At every stage of our work inside we have needed the contributions of others to go forward, and at every phase and every need someone has stepped forward to help. We are grateful to everyone.
Nitin: Thank you both so much for sharing your work with Epicenter, it is truly inspiring.
Learn more about Max and Jacob’s work and the Crossroads Art Club.
