Wendy Clarke: The Prison Tapes

A screening and conversation with Wendy Clarke and Nigel Poor, presented in collaboration with Cushion Works and Ear Hustle on the occasion of the exhibition Wendy Clarke: The Prison Tapes on view through Nov. 14, 2026. Wendy Clarke is a video pioneer whose practice spans more than five decades. The daughter of avant-garde filmmaker Shirley Clarke, she has spent her career positioning the camera as a tool for intimacy, dialogue, and human connection across social and institutional boundaries. She is best known for Love Tapes, a collection of over 2,500 video recordings of people talking about love. In conjunction with The Prison Tapes (1979-2002), an exhibition on view at Cushion Works through November 14, The Lab presents an evening with Clarke. The program includes a screening of rarely-seen video work and a discussion with the artist Nigel Poor, co-founder and co-host of Ear Hustle, the first podcast created and produced inside a prison. Their conversation will be recorded and presented as a special episode of the podcast. For several years in the 1980s and 90s, Clarke was an artist in residence within the California prison system—at the Ventura Youth Correctional Facility, the California Institution for Men in Chino, and the CIM Del Norte facility, working primarily with men in the HIV/AIDS unit. In dingy dayrooms and with minimal resources, she created the conditions for exchange and discovery, treating all those who wished to tell their stories as collaborators. She engaged video not simply as a production tool but as a means of real-time reflection, prioritizing attention over circulation and exchange over exhibition. The result is some of the most tender and rigorous video work of her generation—diaristic, therapeutic, and largely unseen. The evening presents a rare opportunity to see artworks from the Cushion Works exhibition and beyond, including excerpts from Prison Love Tapes (1979), footage of men and women at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City speaking about love; One on One (1991–94), video pen pal exchanges between inmates at the California Institution for Men and collaborators on the outside; Videomasks, mask-based work with inmates at Del Norte; Amen (1992), a collective reflection in which inmates recall memories from birth to the present; and Inside Out (2002), video diaries made by young women at Ventura Youth Correctional Facility. Wendy Clarke (b. 1944) is an artist based in Taos, New Mexico. Her work has been screened and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Walker Art Center, and the Wadsworth Atheneum, among others, and she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Her extraordinary work in the field of video art is now held in the archives of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Nigel Poor is a Bay Area visual artist whose practice explores time, memory, and accumulation. Her work is in the collections of SFMOMA and the de Young Museum, among others. Her “San Quentin Project,” which debuted at the Milwaukee Art Museum, presented personal narratives about life inside prison through visual documents and photographs. Poor is a photography professor at California State University Sacramento, and, for several years, taught photography in San Quentin State Prison. In 2017, she co-founded Ear Hustle with Earlonne Woods and Antwan Williams, both of whom were incarcerated at the time. The podcast has been downloaded over 90 million times, is heard in 1500 prisons and jails around the world, and, in 2020, was a finalist for the first ever Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting.