Project Mend led a public reading and workshop as part of the Syracuse Art Trail—an initiative of CNY Arts—on Sunday, July 20. Surrounded by painted murals and different stories stitched onto canvases at CNY Arts’ open-access gallery space, Art in the Atrium, a different display of art emerged, coming not from color or form but from the lived experiences of those impacted by the criminal legal system.

Founded to support, promote and celebrate arts throughout Central New York, CNY Arts brings together different art mediums in both traditional spaces and unconventional ones like the Syracuse Art Trail. The Art Trail, a walking tour through downtown Syracuse that features local art and performances at various stops, inviting the community to interact with creative work in unexpected ways. This year, CNY Arts offered Project Mend a space to spotlight the power of storytelling by reflecting on what freedom means to those who have lost it and to the public more broadly.

The Power of Storytelling

“When I think of freedom...” prompted speakers and attendees to consider freedom not as an abstract ideal, but as a personal reckoning of sorts. “This event is important given that many of us are questioning the true meaning of freedom,” said Patrick W. Berry, an associate professor of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University. “For those impacted by the criminal legal system, this question is especially urgent.” Berry, the founder of Project Mend as well as the faculty editor of Intertext, a Syracuse University publication that highlights undergraduate writing, helped frame the event as a conversation. One of the most notable moments came through a preview of an animated short based on Marvin Wade’s “Time and Prison: Are They Mutually Exclusive?” —a piece published in the 2025 issue of Mend, a national and online journal featuring the writings and art of those impacted by the criminal legal system.

Evan Bode, an animator, a filmmaker, and an M.F.A. graduate of Syracuse University, shared insights on how different modes of art, such as language, image, sound and performance, can work together to express layered emotions: “Something interesting happens when there’s poetry and an image, and they talk to each other,” they said. “It's one thing to read a poem on a page. It's another to hear people speak up here reading their own work, with the power of their voices. There is a lot of truth and feeling behind those words.”

Following the preview of Bode’s animated piece, the community heard from Marvin Wade, a formerly incarcerated author and spiritual adviser, who read an excerpt of “Getting Over the Mountain,” which had been published in the premier issue of Mend. “Freedom, for me, means not taking anything for granted,” Wade said. “It means valuing family, life, nature, and just giving back to the community.” For many in the audience, hearing the piece in his voice gave additional meaning to it. Katherine Nikolau, a writing and rhetoric graduate and now a communications and grants associate at CNY Arts, recalled working with Marvin’s piece during the production of Mend’s first issue, “When I first read [Wade’s] piece, it moved me so much, and hearing it in person today was just insane,” she said.

Marion Rodriguez, an artist, a longtime activist against mass incarceration, and the founder of ?MUVSU?, also took the stage, speaking about her creative response to reentry and her handmade bags that are gifted to woman returning home from incarceration, each of which is stitched and painted with intentionality, containing an individualized note of encouragement. “Since walking out [of] the gates in 2020, I lifted my voice instead of lending it by creating these bags. No two are alike, just like the women returning home,” she said. Rodriguez’s work was also on display at the Atrium, inviting attendees to support this project and write a note to a woman coming home after having been incarcerated.

Community Video Project

The event was a unique mix of live performance and multimedia storytelling, blending oral readings, film previews, and public art. As a closing, Project Mend offered a workshop, open to the public, where anyone who wished could participate in a community video project on the topic of what freedom meant to them, with the video facilitated and edited by Bode.

Watch the video.

For those who could not attend the event in person, the journal Mend and our Instagram page remain a growing archive of these stories. Marvin Wade’s “Getting Over the Mountain, “Time and Prison: Are They Mutually Exclusive?” and other published stories can be accessed on SURFACE.

Events like this one reveal how the arts can serve as a site of both resistance and restoration, and how the voices of impacted people must remain relevant in conversations about freedom and social change.

Project Mend is made possible through collaboration with the Center for Community Alternatives and through a HNY Post-Incarceration Humanities Partnership grant, which is generously supported by the Mellon Foundation and the CNY Humanities Corridor. Additionally, the project has been supported at Syracuse University by the Engaged Humanities Network, The Humanities Center, Syracuse University Libraries, and the Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric and Composition.