The Stories Behind the Cards

Caption: A greeting card that reads “For a beautiful girl” on its cover. Inside, the message states, “It’s all the little things you do that make you so special.” It is signed, “Love, Dad.” Greeting card provided by Brianne Sheltraw.

In prisons, connection is governed. Phone calls are timed, visits are monitored, and mail is screened, delayed, and stripped down to photocopies. These controls do more than regulate communication: they portion out what intimacy can look like, how care can be offered, and what forms of presence are possible. The Michigan Department of Corrections, for instance, classifies contact as a "privilege" rather than a right—something that can be revoked at a stroke of a pen.

This exhibition considers greeting cards as products of these violences against relationships, made and circulated within prisons as both art objects and a means of correspondence. Greeting cards are typically dismissed as cheap, mundane, and mass produced items; yet, within prison, they become dense with meaning—small objects asked to hold the weight of birthdays, graduations, apologies, faith, longing, and love.

Across the exhibition, greeting cards appear as tools for “connecting over disconnection”—a way of sustaining relationships when intimacy is violently foreclosed. Their messages and materials show how people in prison make do with what they have in order to keep themselves in mind, to—in the words of the cardmaker and artist A.B.V.O.G—“maintain relevancy” with their loved ones in the free world.

This exhibition reveals how greeting cards assert connection, remembrance, and hope within a system that relentlessly strips away the humanity of those it incarcerates and the relationships they hold captive.