News Flash: Historic Alcatraz Taken Over by Chinese Dissident (Ok, He's an Artist. And He Got Permission.)

Alcatraz. The Rock.

The historic prison on an island in San Francisco bay was the most fearsome and daunting correctional institution in the United States from 1934 until 1963, when it was closed because of high maintenance costs. Over the years, Alcatraz was home to the most notorious bad guys in America – people such as Al Capone, Alvin Karpis, “Whitey” Bulger, Baby Face Nelson and Machine Gun Kelly. It was home to odd inmates, such as bird authority Robert Stroud, made famous by Burt Lancaster in the movie The Birdman of Alcatraz. It was home, too, to a group of Native Americans who took it over in a 1969 protest.

The bleak institution has always been a part of American culture, as well. It was the setting for dozens of popular movies over the decades, such as Escape from Alcatraz, starring Clint Eastwood, The Rock, starring Ed Harris and Sean Connery, Murder in the First, The Enforcer, Point Blank, The Last Gangster, X-Men: The Last Stand and Dark Passage. It was mentioned in just about every 1940s black and white prison movie ever made.

It was the setting for dozens of television movies and series and prominently featured in the Discovery Channel’s series Ghost Lab. It was even home for an episode of the animated G.I. Joe TV series in 1990. In 2012, Fox-TV aired an entire year of their series Alcatraz. More than a dozen best-selling videos games, including Operation 7 and Alcatraz Escape, have been made. It has appeared in the lyrics of dozens of songs. June Carter Cash even recorded one called Alcatraz. A half dozen inmates wrote memoirs about their time at Alcatraz and there have been numerous non-fiction books.

And now, after all these years, all those movies, television shows, books and plays, the historic correctional institution is going to become, of all things, an art museum. Alcatraz will not be a museum filled with Picassos or Rembrandts, but “@Large Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz,” an exhibit filled with unique, legos prisoner portraits and political images of notorious Chinese dissident/artist Ai Weiwei . It opens this week (through April 26, 2015). True to its prison setting, his work includes 174 portraits of “prisoners” of some kind across the globe and throughout history. It will house paintings of South African president Nelson Mandela, Tibetan singer Lolo, whistle blower Ed Snowden plus many Americans.

Artist Weiwei was happy to take on the assignment, which was offered to him by the For-Site Foundation in San Francisco. Cheryl Haines of For-Site, the curator for the project, likes Weiwei’s work. “Alcatraz is rich with social and cultural meaning and is a profound setting to mount an exhibition that explores themes such as the right to free expression, the irrepressible nature of creativity, the role of art, artists, and individuals in working toward social change and the importance of communications in creating a just society. @Large will offer visitors a new cultural and lens through which to experience the complex and potent history o Alcatraz.”

Weiwei is a philosopher. “The misconception of totalitarianism is that freedom can be imprisoned. This is not the case. When you constrain freedom, freedom will take flight and land on a windowsill,” Weiwei tells visitors in an exhibit poster.

Few artists know more about freedom and prison than the dissident. He has been a prisoner himself. The Chinese artist, 57, was detained for 81 days in 2011 by the Beijing government. Weiwei was jailed for “tax evasion” after he began a campaign against the government for constructing numerous unsafe houses that perished in an earthquake. He is not permitted to travel outside of China and has never been to Alcatraz.

“They detained me for 81 days, but they never killed me,” said the artist in a handbook, Weiwei-isms.

The political activist has drawn mostly good notices for his work. Many critics applauded his large pieces, such as the artistic design for the 2008 Olympic Stadium in Beijing, the “Bird Cage.” In an review in The Telegraph, a British newspaper, critic Alistair Smart wrote that “he creates new through destroying old, a comment on the denial – and indeed destruction -- of China’s rich cultural history by this and previous governments..”

Weiwei put together the Alcatraz exhibit using internet photos and maps of Alcatraz and the notes of two assistants who did visit the facility. “I may not be the best artist, but I really am the best remote control artist. I use the internet, use skype, just use communication,” he told a reporter for Time Out Shanghai newspaper. There have been two recent documentaries about Weiwei, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry and The Fake Case.

The $3.6 million exhibit is housed in the New Industries Building, the hospital, the psychiatric observation cells,’ A’ Block and the Dining Hall. The cellblock wing is home to a collection of old prisoner shovels, attached to form a wing. A group of cells have had sound devices installed and visitors can listen to the stories of prisoners throughout history, told in their own words.

It is intriguing that the National Park Service is so flexible that it could take a prison that opened in the 1930s and turn it into a modern museum whose works protest incarcerations of many prisoners throughout history.

After it closed in 1963, the foreboding prison became a storied tourist attraction and museum. Boats from the mainland carry an average of 1.5 million tourists to the prison each year, making it one of the most visited tourist attractions in the United States. There is even an Alcatraz gift shop on the pier and an Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon each year.

So, if you are in San Francisco and looking for an interesting art exhibit in an historic place, both in history and culture, take the ferry out to Alcatraz. Don’t worry; they’ll bring you back.