Inmate art on display at Library Station through end of May

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. - It's a collection of art unlike any other.

The Library Station on North Kansas Expressway is hosting an exhibit called "Art Behind Bars" -- and the materials used are pretty unusual.

From bars of soap to toilet paper, the art is created using anything the artists had on hand. The reason they were so limited is because the artists are prison inmates.

The collection itself belongs to a man named Bob Reed, a chaplain at the Stone County Jail. Before he moved to the Ozarks, Reed worked at a prison in New York where inmates made the art.

The exhibit went up Monday and will be on display at the Library Station for a month. Reed hopes the display helps people see the talents the inmates have, and see them as people rather than just prisoners.

"We need to give them all the help we can," Reed said. "We need to reach out to them, and this hopefully will make the public aware of the talents they have and that they are important people that we need to reach out to."

Reed says he'd like to be able to do something similar with inmates around here if he could make it work, but the program is better for prisoners with longer sentences because they are in more need of constructive ways to pass the time.

After May, the display will go back to Reed's house until he finds another place that would like to display it. It's already been on display at Evangel University as well as a church in Joplin.