At a Rhiannon Giddens concert in Pennsylvania last fall, an audience member shouted “Free Spel!” into the crowd. Giddens, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and Grammy-award winning musician, is known for infusing her art with education and advocacy around the legacy of slavery and the African origins of folk music—particularly with her instrument of choice, the banjo. On tour for her album You're the One, though, she had a different focus: elucidating the experience of those wrongfully convicted in the United States. Spel is one of those people.
A few months earlier, Giddens’ team had reached out to the Pennsylvania Innocence Project. They were interested in collaborating with an artist impacted by incarceration whose work they could feature by way of the tour’s merchandise; proceeds would benefit the legal nonprofit’s exoneration efforts. (Experts have reported a 6 percent error rate in this country’s convictions, with some estimating that figure is much higher.) Giddens also sought to commission an artwork specifically responding to her song, “Another Wasted Life,” a tribute to the late Kalief Browder who, at 22, died by suicide after being wrongfully held on Rikers Island for three years without trial. The artwork’s release would coincide with the song’s music video, featuring 22 wrongfully convicted men who collectively served over 500 years in prison.
The Pennsylvania Innocence Project did not hesitate to recommend Spel, who, having started his artistry in graffiti, has spent decades processing his nearly 35-year incarceration through painting, drawing, and collage. For most of his sentence, Spel was confined at State Correctional Institution — Graterford, a since-closed prison where he nurtured a robust community with fellow incarcerated artists, many of whom remember him energetically touring passersby through his stacks of pieces and working with the prison to allow him to stretch and paint on canvases in empty rooms. (The Pennsylvania Innocence Project represents Spel in his clemency application to the Board of Pardons.)
To meet the timing demands of the tour, it was clear from Spel’s initial Zoom with Giddens and his lawyers in August 2023 that the collaboration would be twofold. First, Spel sifted through photocopies of his archive to select an older piece to be featured on Giddens’ tour merchandise. In addition to this visual for tour magnets, T-shirts, and keychains, Spel completed a new piece that fall, AWL (ANOTHER WRITTEN LETTER), inspired by “Another Wasted Life.” This piece, now stored alongside the bulk of his oeuvre at Atelier Fine Art Services in Philadelphia, was sold on T-shirts during Giddens’ spring tour this year.
In tandem with this fall’s launch of the Graterford Archive, the Haverford-based project examining the history of the artists and changemakers incarcerated at SCI-Graterford, CULTURED sat down with Spel and Giddens to discuss their collaboration—and how they see their artistry as a channel for justice more broadly.
When Giddens joined the Zoom for their second time connecting “in person,” Spel had just started to tell the story of how he freed a sparrow from prison years ago. He had found a bird whose nest was discarded by a Grateford staff member. He dug for worms to feed the sparrow using tools from his job at the prison’s paint shop, made a perch for it, and taught it to fly in his cell. After training it to come when called by bird sounds, he released the bird into the free world. His “jail bird,” as he called it, made it to the other side. Such is the imagination and investment in collective freedom that fuelled Giddens and Spel’s collaboration.
Spel: Rhiannon, Rhiannon, Rhiannon! I was listening to your music this morning to ease my soul. I was sitting one day just contemplating things, and I felt in my spirit to go to the TV. It's like, turn to channel three. I flipped to it and boom. You were performing on one of the morning shows. My hair just stood up. I'd never seen you perform—I don't have that luxury to see anything on the internet. I made a prayer right then and there. I said, “God, this was the right collaboration, you just confirmed that.”
Then, on Nightline, they were highlighting your performance at the Beacon Theater. And when the cameras showed the crowd, I was looking for people in their “Free Spel” shirts. It was awesome.
Giddens: It meant a lot for me to work with you to expose people to the idea of how difficult it is to create art from inside, how imperative it is to create art, and how we could connect from visual art to music together, telling the same story. Different circumstances, but same intention. I'm just really grateful.
Spel: Wherever you put me, I will produce. When I was incarcerated at Graterford, if you came to my cell, it was like a studio. That’s why I’ve amassed a collection of over 200 artworks over my 34-plus years in here.
Creating in here is so challenging. Just having that mental fortitude and finding that quiet space to focus—it's difficult. One of the first pieces that I did, I didn't have anything. I talked to my buddy and his brother gave me some real cheap acrylic paint and one brush. I had a toothbrush, an old sheet, and paid a guy a pack of cigarettes to make me a stretcher with a stapler. That became the canvas for my first piece.
CULTURED: Could you share what the collaboration looked like around “Another Wasted Life”?
Giddens: The song I wrote years ago, when I read about what happened to Kalief Browder. I'm not a huge songwriter, and most of the songs I have written have been about historical injustices around slavery. But this seemed like a clear continuation of that, just in a modern sense. So when I did this record—which was supposed to be all original material—I knew this one needed to go on it because we were doing a different set of orchestration. It was more modern, the kind of music that would draw more people into the story. And that was important to me, that it had as much possibility of being heard.
Then I was alerted to the artistry of Spel, and a collaboration came about where he could respond to the song and the story and what I was trying to do in his absolutely beautiful visual way.
Spel: “Another Wasted Life” wasn’t out yet so, in preparation for the piece, my counsel sent me the lyrics. I randomly selected and purchased some of Rhiannon’s music based on titles alone, since sound bites are not provided by the DOC [Department of Corrections]. Eventually, I got to hear the song over Zoom and I read The New Yorker article on Kalief Browder’s story. That’s where I started.
I called it AWL (ANOTHER WRITTEN LETTER), so the acronym correlates with Rhiannon’s song. Letter is also how we refer to someone who is doing life rather than a fixed sentence, like, “he’s got letters.”
The piece is a combination of acrylic, graphite, and found items on paper, and I began working by inscribing the date Kalief was arrested along the top. I included the number 22, the age Kalief’s life ended and the age I was arrested. Kalief was 16 when he was arrested, which made me think about the [JFK and Mac Miller] song “17” where “he was only 17 in a mad man’s dreams” loops. I quickly etched that into the wet paint which, afterward, looked like open wounds through a red flesh color. I also incorporated some of Kalief's' favorite cartoons from Pokémon. I went to the library and researched some of the characters, like Gulpin, a large beastly fish that swallows and consumes. It had me thinking about how we refer to being in prison as being in the belly of the beast, which made me think about Jonah from the Bible, and how he spent three days and three nights in the belly of the whale. That’s how long this piece took me. I decided Kalief’s portrait had to be the central image—his head tilted back, slightly in the shadows, his eyes shut showing what appeared to be swelling around them, signifying possibly one last beat down from the authorities before being released.
CULTURED: What did you learn about each other’s artistry in this process?
Spel: To collaborate with a musician was a whole new challenge for me, because I'm one who spontaneously creates from within. On our first Zoom meeting, I remember asking you, Rhiannon, “What is your work about? What's your core message?” And you paused and said, “I like to tell truth.” And my response to that was like, “Listen, I haven't even heard your music yet but I'm already a fan.” The work that you do, Rhiannon, and the work that I do is one in the same.
Rhiannon: I'd seen examples of Spel’s work and just was blown away [by] his innovative use of colorways, shapes, brushstrokes, and different media. Then seeing the piece that he created specifically for “Another Wasted Life” was overwhelming. I draw for fun and have since I was little. I think it gives me even more of an appreciation for the different techniques that he used, how his approaches varied and how he represented emotion juxtaposed with the incredible, lifelike interpretation of [Kalief’s] face. It was a visual of how I felt: anger, grief, destabilized, and an intense longing to protect this boy that I’d never met and who had already transitioned.
Which is what art is about—creating those emotional shortcuts that make you feel an immediate, visceral connection.
CULTURED: You all had Spel’s artwork on your merchandise for two recent tours. What was the impact of having that visual paired with your music? How did audiences respond?
Giddens: It did what I hoped it would do, which is to extend their experience. Because the thing about music is that it's ephemeral. It's powerful, but, even though they have the recording, it's never going to be the same as that performance; especially the way that I had been doing it with my nephew, who had composed a rap response to the song. But the visual meant they could take that memory with them.
Spel: You mentioned ephemeral—it's the same when I was creating work as a teenager in the public. It's short-lived, you know? I definitely want to continue to create with you. And if you do decide, in the near future, to create a new project, I want to design your album cover.
Giddens: I love it.
Spel: I come from a hip hop background, so that was my first love. But as I'm getting older and maturing, I'm listening to different music. Before we had our tablets [where we can now pay to send emails, access certain books, and listen to music], we would tune into college stations. I was listening to the Princeton station, painting, and I just felt so at ease as I was moving along. Then I realized it was the classical music that had me so calm. Here, it's typically mental gymnastics to just be able to tune things out.
CULTURED: How do your chosen art forms lend themselves to this type of justice work?
Giddens: Making sounds has been a way that humans have healed each other for millennia. It's only recently that it's become a product to sell, trade, and buy. So I try to use my work in its original intention. Within a capitalistic context, it's difficult because it's not set up for that. It's set up for hooks, whatever is the most popular thing.
Spel: When you're in a place like this, surrounded by iron, steel, and concrete, there’s no way out. When that door gets shut behind you and you’re there with your thoughts, there’s nowhere to run. You have to really dig introspectively. Especially with the gravity of what I'm dealing with. I'm in here for something I didn't do. I came in when I was 22 years old. My brain wasn't even developed. And so my practice has evolved since then. It isn’t just about creating art to survive, or even to deal with the horrific experiences in here. It’s about creating for a bigger purpose. I knew when I was younger and working on my graffiti that creativity was a powerful tool—for connection and acceptance with my peers—but how powerful it was would come years down the road when I started engaging in works that would serve to make a difference out there.
CULTURED: We often talk about the power artists have to imagine a new world, one that’s more equitable and liberating. What does that look like for you two?
Giddens: I think it’s a world where we care about each other, where there's less hoarding of resources. Why would you feel good about being able to get into your car and go to work if other people have their freedom taken from them because of a corrupt system and society? It’s really luck that places me in this situation and Spel in his situation, and that's important for people to understand. But they don't, because we have this crazy meritocracy fallacy that we believe in. Really, we're all the same, and we're all deserving of love and respect. We also need to hold people accountable for harm that they do to other people—and I include corporations and politicians in those groups.
Spel: In a nutshell: love. We need more love. This might be a hip hop thing—I'm big on acronyms—but love to me means “Love is Optimal Value Expressed.” If I can use the work that I create as a vehicle to share with others, that there's a different way, that's the most important thing for me. It starts in here with my community, and then transitions to the street.
