“Shards” by George (Mesro) Coles-El
In his scathing 2007 documentary Sicko filmmaker/activist Michael Moore cast a harsh light on healthcare by comparing the dysfunctional for profit healthcare system of The United States with the more humane approach to healthcare adopted in Canada, France and elsewhere (aka universal healthcare or socialized medicine). A few years later, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh boasted that he bypassed the insurance companies by paying his enormous hospital bill in cash ( “out of pocket” in insurance lingo. I nearly collapsed when I noticed on a recent pharmacy bill that my eyedrops are $873 out of pocket!). Presumably every American should be able to do the same thing and pull himself or herself up by golden bootstraps attained through hard work and unwavering faith in The American Dream (namely that the playing field is level and opportunity is equal for everyone). Though some may vehemently deny it, political ideologies are usually irrelevant when it comes to their bottom line. Checkbook liberals are just as bad or worse than conservatives if you’re not instantly viewed as a cash cow (i.e. You won’t be seen or treated by a doctor unless you have insurance—and even if you do have insurance, It must be the right insurance from a company of their choosing—or, like Rush Limbaugh, you can pay upfront. But they may feign empathy as you’re being ushered out the door.)
If the business of America has always been about business, it comes as no surprise that the mental health industry too has mushroomed into a multi-billion dollar industry over the decades. That wasn’t always the case. Back in the milquetoast 1950s, the stigma surrounding mental illness was so great that the idea of seeking help for problems that couldn’t be seen were kept in the shadows or swept under the carpet—and certainly not a topic for polite dinner table conversation. “Therapy” might consist of male family member with major anger management issues of his own bellowing to “stop your bellyaching!”. On TV, the threat of domestic violence was played for belly laughs on The Honeymooners as Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) would threaten to punch his wife Alice in the face: “One of these days… POW! Right in the kisser!” became the anticipated punchline that left audiencesin stitches. If “Big Girls Don’t Cry” (sung by a man in a piercing falsetto no less) in the mid-1960s, it was implicitly understood that men either didn’t have feelings at all or if they did were supposed to keep them bottled up and unexpressed at all costs lest they be perceived as something less than a man by the culture at large. By the 1970s, however,the ‘T’ word had entered the lexicon of pop culture and became fodder for both serious feature films (The grim One Flew Over The Cuckoo’ Nest took an unflinching lookatlife in a psychiatric hospital) as well as more light-hearted entertainment on the boob tube via sitcoms such as The Bob Newhart Show (of course Dr. Hartley’s patients tended to be predominantly White and well-to-do). Psychiatrists and psychologists have long been the butt of jokes and disparagingly referred to as “shrinks”. Those who can afford to go see their shrinks (short for “head shrinker”—a term derived from the practice of literally creating shrunken heads amongst certain Amazonian tribes), whose years of training and resulting expertise ostensibly bestows them with the ability to get inside your head to help shrink your problems away.
Here in the 21st century psychotherapy is still largely, if not exclusively, a pricy luxury for the middle and upper classes even as issues surrounding mental health have once again emerged from the shadows and resurfaced as a hot topic to discuss around the proverbial water cooler. Enlightened high-profile world-class athletes such as tennis star Naomi Osaka and Gold Medal Olympians Michael Phelps and Simone Biles— individuals who are widely seen as demigods and not simpering wimps or weaklings who can’t get their acts together— have led the way by going public with their own mental health struggles.
Be that as it may, empathy has, by and large, become a four-letter word trickling from top on down in our current zeitgeist (2026). Business titan and Oligarch-in-Chief Elon Musk brands those on public assistance as a “parasite class” (via a reposted meme). Domestic terrorism has become the law of the land (the ICE Man cometh), Given this inhospitable climate, the last place one would expect to find a sympathetic ear, let alone adequate resources, is inside a broken penal system where rehabilitation of inmates is a low priority at best. More likely, mental health services are severely lacking if not outright nonexistent inside prison walls.
That being the case, incarcerated artist George (Mesro) Coles-El, this year’s People’s Choice Award winner, took matters into his own hands, becoming both patient and therapist. In doing so, he joins a long tradition of turning to art making as a form of affordable therapy (Van Gogh, the prototypical expressionist painter, may be the most storied example of an artist who wrestled with his personal demons across colorful and often convulsive canvases—self-help sans the enormous bill at the end of a truncated psychotherapy session). Coles-El’s gut-wrenching life story plays out across a modest mixed-media drawing Shards (2025) punctuated with muted sunburst hues and impassioned autobiographical rapid-fire couplets torn from a diary or dream journal that demands to be seen, heard, and, most of all, felt. Given the predominance of his words (They occupy well over half the sheet of paper), it comes as no surprise that he sees himself more as a wordsmith and poet than as a visual artist per se. He goes on to explicitly say that his rapped lyrics that are his therapy (i.e. literally a rap sheet here):
Although the artist likens his what he terms his “statement” (akin to something an attorney would present at an evidentiary procedure hearing inside a courtroom) to a sun due to the proliferation of pale reds, yellows, and oranges that serve as a translucent backdrop for a poignant rapped poetry that pull no punches. Steely bas relief stanzas are set against a gauzy backdrop nestled inside a large faux picture frame whose fibrous ropey border brings to mind scar tissue one might find on some strangely visceral war memorial plaque that conjures a blood-and-puss soaked bandage concealing an unhealed wound. The overall effect is both hard and soft—armor wreathed in cotton—and suitable for framing (like the fate of many behind bars failed by the justice system):
“Mom left Pops with nowhere to go. Everything I asked for, she said, “NO!” Slapped in the face like ‘what you crying for?..”.
“I’m in the projects with the thirty-eight revolver passed off to family members bribed to bother. Police looking at me like I’m their next collar. Bullied at school for wanting to be an author. Started rapping when my pain got hard to swallow.”
Slapped against the wall directly beneath this grand statement, a smaller but equally formidable sign that reads NO WARNING SHOTS in boldface blood-red lettering serves as a cardboard memento mori—a grim reminder death is always close at hand (Coles-El’s final couplet reads “But I gotta be prepared for life I can’t see. Might not live long enough to be a parolee.”) Streaming alongside both is something along the lines of iridescent green ice floes whose jagged safety glass-like islands form the word “shards”. For this the artist was inspired by kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics and the like by filling in the cracks of the broken pieces with a mixture of lacquer and gold. He says the title (not to mention the floating fragments) highlight his brokenness and the process of putting himself back together.
One thing is clear. Cole-El’s words possess a dogged solidity and steely resilience in sharp contrast to the cartoonish paper doll power couple in the foreground identified (and presented mock superhero style—substitute turtle necks for capes) as the District Attorney and Parole Commissioner. They’re drawn as a pair of portrait busts whose heads are shown in profile with unseen truncated legs yet in every sense are mirror images existing in psychological lockstep (The twosome also appears to be holding hands beneath the bottom of the cropped composition as if in cahoots cutting some covert “under the table” deal to benefit themselves)
Needless to say, the caricatures comprising this not very dynamic duo don’t exactly represent profiles in courage. Sporting a red, white and blue turtle-neck the flaxen-haired, tightly pursed ruby-lipped prosecutor looks like she just hopped out of a Bullwinkle cartoon (Wonder Woman she’s not). The simian-looking melon-headed parole commissioner, for his part, conjures Cro-Magnon Man clad in green leisure wear—a kind of anti-Mr. Clean, Jolly Green Giant and Incredible Hulk rolled into one. These protagonists (i.e. antagonists) neither exhibit empathy nor show the slightest glint of compassion—just a bear trap close-mindedness that mirrors the gloomy gray double doors behind them through which not a ray of light penetrates the crack of this hermetically sealed “portal” that looks like it would be impossible to pry open with a crowbar and exceedingly difficult with a stick or two of dynamite. All of which makes the red Exit sign glowing above especially ironic and lends the scene even more of an ominous No Exit air. One can almost hear Dante’s ghost whispering “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”. Welcome to Hell on Earth. Justice is supposed to be blind. Here, the two individuals who hold the fate of Coles-El’s life in their hands turn both a blind eye and deaf ear (See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil). Fittingly, both bloodless (in reality heartless) caricatures have their eyes tightly shut and, to punctuate the point, the Parole Commissioner is depicted, like Van Gogh, with half an ear.
Although his powerful lyrics receive marquee billing (Easily seen—in fact impossible to remain unseen one has their back turned as is the case with the twin pillars of injustice in the foreground), the decidedly darker-skinned artist has relegated himself to the background, casting himself in the role of stand-up comic/rapper, microphone in hand, rapping to catch the attention of his captive yet myopic and wholly disinterested audience from atop a plush mauve make-shift stage in the form of an old Victorian psychiatric couch that has itself become a musty pop culture cliché. (One can almost picture Sigmund Freud entering from the wings intoning Coles-El to “Tell me your problems” in a thick Austrian accent. If he were living today, the cigar smoking, cocaine addled Father of Psychoanalysis might well have found himself behind bars on drug charges. As it was, he and a colleague nearly killed a female patient during a botched medical procedure attempting to cure her of “hysteria” while both were under the influence of the “magical drug”). Although it may be anybody’s guess whether the pen is ultimately mightier than the sword (let alone the barrel of a gun) here, the way the tools of his trade (what appears to be some combination of colored pencils/felt-tip pens/wax crayons) poke out of his breast pocket like part of a colorful ammunition belt offers a clue to Coles-El’s philosophic musings and aspirations. Hope springs eternal even from behind bars and deep within an entrenched society that is still largely Sicko.
~Harry Roche