I never really thought that I'd be an artist.

I'm pretty sure my mom wanted me to be an artist.

She always really seemed to encourage that.

My father read me a lot of stories, but he wouldn't read a story just once.

He'd go back to earlier stories and change parts to make sure I was paying attention.

I think he wanted me to be a writer, but I didn't want to be a writer or an artist.

I wanted to be an architect.

I wanted to design the blueprints for skyscrapers.

I dreamed one day I would design geometric towers that reached high into the sky.

But in my teens, my first girlfriend was killed in a car accident.

Then life was diverted by drugs.

I was incarcerated at 17 for dealing in bank robbery.

Right around the time I should have gone to college.

And when the World Trade Center fell on 911.

I stopped dreaming about designing skyscrapers.

That's when an old clockmaker in a prison woodshop introduced me to the technique of designing and cutting wood scroll work.

It was a subtractive art.

Everything was designed like a maze disguised in the image of other things.

To cut the art, you didn't focus on the subjects, but rather remove the negative to reveal them.

Hidden Blueprints is a collection of artwork cut from blueprints that were designed on tape together.

Pieces of paper and hidden in prison for years until they were brought home and cut in mahogany.

Well, this artworks from prison.

It's not all about prison.

It's a collection of artwork that portrays scenes of the lives prisoners created for themselves.

Stories rarely tell about the internal lives of prisoners when the reality is they're not living in prison in their minds, they're daydreaming.

They're imagining a life of their own.

For some of us, that was a life of escape or some earliest form of our inner selves emerged and set off on a journey to find its way home.

There's a lot of stories I could share with you from this collection.

Designing it spanned many years, like the year we sought to overcome our loneliness by starting an ancient adventure story and smuggling it back and forth with the women's prison through the men.

We wrote it together and learned a lot about each other just from the characters we chose to write.

The woman's character was a young princess who was lost and fleeing a dark home.

She was scared but hopeful of what she would find next.

My character was a young boy in oversize armor, trying to be the man he knew he was supposed to be.

But trapped in a world where he was all alone.

The story allowed us to develop real relationships in the imaginary space between two prisons.

Then there was the time we started a provocative cartoon series for the women's prison called The Flower Garden, where prohibited sexuality was expressed through a comedy about a single rose.

It's such a beautiful rose.

I don't know if I should pluck it.

You gardeners take good care of your flowers, but every time you see a beautiful rose, you just want to treat it all delicate.

Sometimes a beautiful rose just needs to get plucked.

You know what?

You're right.

I should just go ahead and pluck it right now.

What do you think?

But of all the stories I could share from this collection, there's one story where it all began in 2004.

Shipped a thousand miles away to the Lee Adjustment Center, a corrections Corporation of America, for profit prison hills of Kentucky.

That was where I met Mickey.

When I first arrived in Kentucky, I found a strange culture of fighting crime, menaces.

People would collect menaces from the yard and keep them in shoeboxes.

Then they'd match them in fights to the death.

They'd bet commissary on the fights.

And when one menace ate the other, the loser would have to pay up.

I made friends and began fighting menaces myself.

At first we lost, but in time we found one menace that stood out from all the others.

It would win all of its fights and everyone had to pay us.

We fed it commissary to grow bigger and stronger than all the other menaces.

Anything?

We named him Mickey after the old life cereal commercial.

Let's get like.

Yeah, he read it.

He hates everything.

He likes it.

We called it him and named him Mickey.

But the female menaces usually eat the males.

So we all acknowledge that reality.

Mickey was probably a macho Mickey one.

All of his fights.

He was champion.

But outside of the fights is where things began to get interesting.

A big difference between Mickey and all the other managers was that we didn't keep Mickey in a shoebox.

Menaces kept in shoeboxes would fight whoever reached it.

We let Mickey live in the cell with us.

And over time, he began to interact with us in ways that we never expected from.

But if you called out to Mickey, he would come to you.

If you put your hand out for Mickey, he would climb on.

If you put Mickey on your shoulder and stood apart from someone else who Mickey knew.

And they called out.

Mickey would fly over and land on their shoulder.

And Mickey would make direct eye contact with you when you were speaking.

He proved to be much more intelligent than we ever knew.

He became our friend.

We stopped fighting, man.

It's like he made everybody realize they weren't just stupid.

Insects and boxes.

At that same time, other events were taking shape, and I found myself in a dilemma.

An outside college had offered 20 inmates an opportunity to be in school.

They would send teachers into the prison to hold classes.

I was one of the people who it was offered to, but conditions in the facility were deteriorating.

There were racial tensions in segregation.

The warden was packing more and more people into the prison to make money.

There were a lot of abuses happening and no one would listen to us.

We decided we had to do something.

I found myself with a choice pursue my college opportunity or support an uprising.

And I chose to support the uprising.

I helped my friends plan.

There were older than me and had more time, so they insisted that I not be a part of the action.

But we all agreed that no one would be killed the night it happened.

We never really knew what the results would be.

It all started when prisoners set a series of fires inside prison dorms and prisoners were running loose inside the walls until officials had to use some chemical agents to try to control the scene.

No inmates were able to escape and no one.

It's really hard to characterize what it's like to watch a prison burn from the inside.

I can never fully articulate that.

As I sat watching the administration building burn, I thought about how the classrooms were in that same building.

My college opportunity was burning before my eyes and I had no way to get back to my cell to protect my kids.

Our friend Mikey, the champion Fighting Mantis, was killed in 2004 and the Adjustment Center riot.

No humans died that night.

Life was different after the riot.

Media attention had been drawn to the conditions and the warden was fired.

But the facility was partially burned and we sat in lockdown while they rebuilt the prison around us.

I had a lot of time to think, and that's when a seed sprouted.

I decided that I would document our lives and stories and our I design scroll work on tape together, pieces of paper, because that was the only way that I could make blueprints big enough to depict our stories.

But we weren't allowed to have tape together pieces of paper, because they could be used to cover a hole in the wall.

So I hid the designs and my legal work.

The first piece that I designed as a tribute to Mikey, not the story of an insect, but the story of a captured slave turned gladiator who won the hearts of the people and went on to become a scholar and ambassador in an ancient world.

Life moved on, and over the years many more stories would follow.

And I would document those stories and blueprints, too.

But while we made new adventures for ourselves and I designed our history into an archive of scroll work, we never forgot about Mikey.

Lessons learned from Mikey found their way into our everyday lives when ants were raiding ourselves through cracks in the walls, looking for crumbs rather than sweeping them up and throwing them away.

We would ask ourselves, What would make you say, Hey, Mikey, say give them a damn coming, right?

So we paid an homage of daily crumbs to those ants and they actually stopped raiding ourselves when people had conflicts with other prisoners.

Once again, we would ask ourselves, What would Mikey say?

This praying mantis had become a kind of legend among prisoners.

Even people who were never in the riot knew who Mikey was.

So I decided to take the time to write about Mikey's story and the things he came to influence.

Shortly after writing Mikey Story, all of the men were moved out of that prison and it was turned into a women's facility.

The paper was lost until one day in the new prison.

I was called over to the education building.

I didn't know what I had been called over for, but as soon as I arrived, the teachers looked at me and said one word, Mikey.

The story had been found in the other facility and forwarded.

Even the women's prison knew about Mikey now.

The teachers immediately offered me an opportunity to start college.

Our champion fighting menace that had been killed in a prison riot where my first college opportunity burned.

I'd just come back years later and got me into college.

When I finally came home, I brought the blueprints of our stories with me.

I spent much of my first years in a windowless attic cutting those blueprints into the collection of artwork.

It was always meant to be Champlain College student Jeremy McKenzie, who spent years behind bars for dealing and doing drugs.

Now he shared that part of his story with us Thursday night night in part two of our special series, His New Life as an Artist is being celebrated at the state house and all across our region for his work.

Welcome to stuck in Vermont, brought to you by seven days.

My name is Eversole Berger and this is an artist's talk given by Jeremy Leigh McKenzie and his show is called Hidden Blueprints.

As much as this collection of artwork is a collection from prison, it's not really a story about prison.

It's a story about people and the complicated, sometimes conflict filled situations that we find ourselves in, whether that's on the inside or the outside.

Mikey's story was shared at colleges and galleries across the state, even in the halls of the state capitol.

Mikey would become a legend, not just among prisoners, but a legend in the outside world.

I share this story with you now as I finally graduate from college.

13 years after the riot in Kentucky, one of my best friends in college said to me, You were always the architect, never the prisoner.

But to get from there to the architect, you had to take away the right things.

You had to remove the negative to reveal.

I'm glad my father tested me as a boy because the story did change.

One thing I've come to know is that just like school, work, life itself is a maze disguised in which of other things.

But it's not a fixed maze.

It's a maze with moving walls, credit.

And thank my for showing the way home.

Vermont Public Partnering with local filmmakers to bring you stories made here.

For more, visit vermontpublic.org