California’s “golden gulag” — prison thru a painter’s eye

Here's a great story on KCET's arts blog, about an exhibition at UC Riverside called Geographies of Detention. Title sounds heavily academic, but the paintings serve what may be art's highest purpose — to tell hard truths with sly beauty, as in this painting of Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, by Sandow Birk. 

Writes Nicolette Rohr for KCET's arts blog:

Birk shared [at a panel discussion] how he came to paint the prison landscapes displayed in the [California Museum of Photography's] first floor galleries, remarking that he had been drawn to the idealized visions of California depicted in 19th Century paintings when he heard on the radio that California had the largest prison population in the world. He then decided to paint prisons. He'd never really seen one, but the figure seemed to complicate those early, idyllic images of California as Eden.

Unforgettable.