Raymond Gray has learned from life, and hard times, and even from love. His artwork reflects all of those. That he has spent more than 29 years in prison makes his work even more incredible.
Coleman Young, the late mayor of Detroit owned one of Ray's paintings. Former State Senator Henry Stallings exhibits some of Ray's work and is selling prints for him. You will see very few original paintings of Ray's for sale because one never knows when the prison will totally stop all paints coming into the prison. If that happens, Ray will draw with pencils. If he can't get pencils, he will give new meaning to watercolors. He will keep finding ways to express his art.
Ray's work has been exhibited at Art Expo 2001 in New York at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, and at other galleries throughout the East Coast. It has traveled with New Initiatives for the Arts to galleries all over Michigan, and more than a dozen pieces are on exhibit at Art on the Ave, in Detroit Michigan (Senator Stallings' gallery).
We will be adding more of Mr. Gray's artwork, so please stop back.
"Click on a picture to get a larger view."
Ray was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for a crime he didn't do. The name of the man who did commit that murder was given to the judge at Raymond's sentencing. Even though there were two people who did the robbery/murder, the police and the system were not interested in following up on that piece of information. You see, in 1973, perhaps even now, if the Detroit police could catch one out of two suspects, that was a 50% success rate - better than their usual. The fact that it was an innocent man was irrelevant.
In December, 1980, Charles Matthews, the same name as appears in the court transcripts, wrote and signed a confession to the crime, the confession was sent to the judge who ordered a hearing, but then the confession disappeared. After three years, Charles Matthews was finally brought into court where he admitted he had "personal knowledge of the crime" and then he took protection of the 5th amendment. There was no sign or clue as to what had happened to the confession.
In December, 2000, almost 20 years to the day, our attorney was going through old paperwork at the State Appellate Defenders office in Detroit, Michigan, and in the file folder was the confession. It fell out, like a twenty year overdue gift from heaven. But this gift is not enough. The court will not let him go that easily. We are putting prints and even some originals of Ray's work up for sale to raise money for Ray's legal expenses including investigators, attorney fees, copying, court filing fees, you can hardly imagine the cost of fighting something like this for over twenty-nine years!
Throughout all of this, Ray has maintained his sanity and kept hope alive in his artwork. When he had oils and canvases, he painted on canvas. When the Department of Corrections forbade the use of oil paints, he switched to acrylics, on canvas or on canvas board when stretcher frames were not available.
When the Michigan Department of Corrections decided that officers' coats would be green, they stopped the prisoners from buying green paint. Ray couldn't buy any; fortunately, green comes from blue and yellow so it wasn't a hardship. We never told the "corrections" people about that one.
