Obie Weathers
Livingston, US
Obie Weathers III is a mixed-media artist whose work emerges from over two decades in solitary confinement on Texas Death Row, where he has used art as a means of survival, resistance, and self-expression. Sentenced to death as a teenager, Obie creates evocative pieces that illuminate the dehumanising effects of incarceration and critique the systemic injustices of the American criminal justice system.
Working with found materials under extreme limitations, Obie’s textured, earthy figures and bold compositions explore themes of resilience, existential survival, and hope. His art is deeply autobiographical, drawing on his Buddhist and yogic practices to portray the struggle to maintain human dignity in the face of overwhelming odds. Obie’s work speaks with the urgency of abolitionist movements, offering a compelling vision of justice, empathy, and the transformative power of creativity.
Artist Interview
Q: Your art has emerged from a deeply personal and challenging environment. Can you share how solitary confinement has shaped your creative process and the themes you explore in your work?
A: When I look at the work of Kate Pincus‑Whitney, I feel she thrives on abundance, which is beautiful. I love that energy. But I thrive on scarcity. There’s a lot of emptiness around me, both physically and psychologically, and you can be destroyed by the emptiness of a place or the psyches of the people who populate that place after the emptiness has gotten into them. So you learn to harness it as raw energy or potential.
I’ve sat two decades plus in solitary confinement cells within a single building in a single prison, watching the paint chip and fall from the walls. The emptiness gets into your body after you are exposed to it for so long, and it has to come out some way. Some people lose their sanity for a while as they pass the emptiness like passing waste from the body. Me, I make art. But I wouldn’t say that my art is a symptom of a psychosis; it’s more like a bulwark against it. It is, in part at least, a product of my internal sanity‑maintenance work.
For a very long time I didn’t have access to art supplies—just a number two pencil, pen, cheap colored pencils, and low‑quality watercolors. The barren environment and the sparse supplies early in my practice are reflected in my continual liberal use of collaged material sourced from anywhere I can find it, a lot of it mailed from friends or picked off the floor. A meditation on the value of what someone has deemed trash? Acquiring art supplies via irregular channels thus became a thing and required creative exercise, as well as ensuring safe passage of the work to the keeping of friends outside because what was allowed out was essentially subject to the approval of what amounted to a censorship committee. Things like this taught me that the “art” in the artwork could be in its process, not strictly its product. And I saw the “work” in artwork being realized in the way I saw the potential of an object I sent out into the world to act as my emissary.
Communication with the outside world has been so restricted for me for the past couple of decades. Such a condition is detrimental to your health. Humans need connection with others to exist, to acquire what we need to be healthy. For those of us who are visual, we find we are drawn to a subject by our eyes. When I was a kid, I’d set fires to get the attention of staff to some problem or need I had. It’s pretty much the same process at work now when I send a painting out into the world.