Cherry’s Treasure

Anon.

Cherry’s Treasure, mid-1960’s

Camel cigarette wrappers and boxes

Texas State Penitentiary, Huntsville, Texas

This exquisitely crafted chest has a hinged lid that covers a protected interior sections. The outer form is articulated by a carefully rendered border that reveals it architecture and gives visual order to its form. The same border emphasizes the outline of the hip-roofed lid when the box is closed. Looking down on the lid, tiles with matching colored edges fill the planes within its borders. Once opened, four chambers are defined by the same oft repeated border, each one lined with white squares laid in diamond patterns. The diamond pattern feature is repeated on the inside of the lid where shiny white surfaces reflect back a warm radiance. Utilizing perhaps as many as 2000 cigarette boxes and wrappers, the artist-inmate has demonstrated extraordinary artistry as well
as an intuitive grasp of design principles such as rhythm, repetition, and balance.

Established in 1849, Huntsville Penitentiary is the oldest Texas State prison. It was a  “Whites Only” prison during a period when blacks accused of crimes were beaten, lynched, or sent as “prison laborers” to work for privately owned plantations such as Huntsville’s Johnson Farm. After the 1865, Huntsville became Texa’s first integrated prison.