Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as “Angola” for the slave plantation that once occupied its land, lies at the dead end of Highway 66.

Past the gate, the road continues—invitation permitting—through 18,000 acres of penal farmland punctuated by gun towers, barbed-wire enclosures, and incarcerated men picking crops on the so-called farm line. America’s largest maximum-security prison, long notorious for its reliance on solitary confinement, Angola runs on the forgotten.

Gary Tyler, a fiber artist and activist, remembers Angola. He arrived in 1974 at seventeen years old, wrongly convicted of shooting a white student during a segregationist mob’s attack on his school bus. The prison is bound on three sides by bayou, bluffs, and swamp; escaping into one’s mind was easier. His grandmother was a quilter, he said, and fabric could be found or bartered. Time was given. Over four decades inside, including two stints on death row, he got good, even renowned. Craftswomen from across the South came to Angola to find the man behind the textiles making rounds outside.