Each butterfly has a story. Maryanne Chisholm’s metamorphosis from incarceration to web3 artist.
Maryanne Chisholm is a storyteller. Drawing inspiration from her personal hardships, NFTs have enabled her to express her creativity more deeply and connect with a global audience of collectors.
Part of Decential Media’s celebration and recognition of Women’s History month
In 2018, when Maryanne Chisholm walked free from prison after 14 years behind bars, she was holding a treasured possession - a portrait she had painted of herself and her husband. Chisholm was the final prisoner to be released that day. She suspects they had made her wait all day because she had stood up to the system. Despite the trauma that the years ‘away’ had dealt Chisholm and her family, her husband was there to pick her up and take her home. The portrait hangs in their house today.
You can see the toll that incarceration has taken on Maryanne Chisholm. Handed a sentence of 31 years for securities fraud, she spent the following years exposing the state of Arizona for what she believed were many layers of injustice surrounding her case. With dogged determination, Chisholm advocated, not only for herself, but for her fellow inmates, to achieve reduced sentences and expose glaring discrepancies within the Arizona justice system. Advocating for female prisoners and helping them to create art as catharsis and empowerment is something she continues to do.
Chisholm says the ordeal left her “physically broken in a lot of ways”, adding that she “Ieft prison with irreparable damage. But my heart was okay.”
Chisholm’s self-portrait with her husband that she painted while in prison in Arizona.
Painting portraits in prison saved Chisholm, who was able to use her talent as a form of currency. She had initially started drawing in prison to avoid ‘looking up’ or bringing any attention to herself. She recalls with amusement her first attempt at creating a portrait from a photograph of an inmate’s son, which ended up as “the worst drawing ever.”
That same night, Leonardo Da Vinci visited Chisholm in a dream so vivid she remembers every word of the detailed portrait masterclass Da Vinci delivered to her in Italian - a language she doesn’t speak, yet managed to do so fluently in the dream. Da Vinci showed Chisholm how to map the face by using the spacing of the eyes in correlation to the bridge, height and width of the nose, lips and chin. As Maryanne Chisholm describes this to me, she is demonstrating on her own face with her fingers.
In recounting the dream, she said that Da Vinci “told me ‘‘I'm going to teach you something, and you will be a better artist when I'm done.’’” He also instructed her to study the Masters. She continued, “I woke up the next day and did a portrait, and it was perfect.” She asked her husband to send 100 printouts of famous paintings to her, which she then recreated on the back of envelopes every day for one year.
With this training behind her, she started creating her own art and began teaching art in prison. She took advantage of computer lessons on offer and read hundreds of books on world religions and spirituality.
Of Da Vinci, she added, “I like to think that wherever he is on the other side, that he took that moment to come to guide me and teach me.”
“I’m definitely a very emotional person. And I express a lot of that through creativity. I didn’t become an artist until I was in prison.”
Everything is laid bare in Chisholm’s art. She uses symbolism to reflect her emotional state, simultaneously hiding and revealing specific motifs within surreal landscapes. Fish and seaweed represent feelings of entanglement and entrapment. Butterflies, on the other hand, are freedom. Flowers bloomed in Chisholm’s imagination, across the dusty, arid landscape surrounding the prison, where plant life was removed to save on watering costs.
She explains, “I hide faces, I hide animals, I hide a lot of things. Because I am complex. What you see on the surface is often nowhere near what is going on underneath the hood. But I love butterflies, because each one is a different story.”
As a lifelong learner, Chisholm first heard about NFTs (non-fungible tokens) in 2020 and announced to her husband that she wanted to stop doing portraits and start doing NFTs. She dived right in and has found success and recognition. Her digital art reveals that she did not discard portraiture, but has deepened her self-exploration and experimentation with the form.
Chisholm now devotes two hours each day to making art and has garnered a significant following on social media. She is a senior curator with HUG, an artist discovery platform founded by Randi Zuckerberg and Debbie Soon. Her art has been exhibited in New York, Dubai, Singapore, Art Basel, Miami Art Week, Paris, London and Beijing. She has sold out collections on several NFT platforms.