Hand-drawn chess board made by Herman Wallace while incarcerated

Source catalog description

This description refers to material held by Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Visual details below describe the original material.

A hand-drawn paper chess board (a), the two-page contextual story of “The Chess Tournament” (b) and (c), created by Herman Wallace while incarcerated at Angola Prison. The black-and-white shaded chess board (a), sketched on a large white paper, features a handwritten number for each of the 64 squares drawn. The first page of "The Chess Tournament" (b), 132 and 133, printed with black text across two columns, outlines the results of Herman’s 34 cent chess tournament. The second page (b), 134, concludes the thoughts from the first page, with a black-and-white graphic design collage depicting two hands shaking and a young man with his head held up, surrounded by various chunks of sentences. The pages were printed on January 24th 2003.

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