Artist Talk with Valentino Dixon

Presented in conjunction with The Pencil Is a Key: Drawings by Incarcerated Artists, artist Valentino Dixon will share the remarkable way he used drawing as a coping mechanism and a pathway to freedom from incarceration. After receiving a sentence of thirty-eight-and-a-half years to life, Dixon began to draw as a way to adapt to life in prison. For the last twenty years of his incarceration, Dixon used vibrantly colored pencils to draw detailed renderings of golf courses, inspired by images of the sport he had never played. His artworks attracted the attention of the golf community, and ultimately a group of Georgetown University undergraduates, who worked to reopen his case. Dixon was released from Attica Correctional Facility in 2018, twenty-seven years after his initial incarceration. Today, Dixon is a practicing artist and an advocate for sentencing reform.