Tatiana von Furstenberg Curates an Exhibit of Art From Inside Prisons

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Dressed in loosefitting pants, a military jacket and black-and-cream heels, her hair curly and buoyant, Tatiana von Furstenberg walked languidly through an exhibition at Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side on a sunny November afternoon.

Drawings in all manners of style — pointillism, minimalism, Art Deco, realism, Pop Art — covered the walls. She strode past studies of nudes, portraits of Rihanna, depictions of Jesus and more, pausing to comment on the ones that caught her eye.

Ms. von Furstenberg, 45, the daughter of the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg (and her first husband, Prince Egon von Furstenberg), first came into the public eye in 1975 at age 4, when her mother released Tatiana, a perfume named after her. As might be expected of someone with a royal father and a glamorous, high-profile mother, Ms. von Furstenberg attended boarding school in Europe, grew up in homes around the world, spoke several languages and was even photographed by Richard Avedon for Egoïste, a French magazine. She was well on her way to being positioned as, if not DVF, and least TVF.

But on this day, Ms. von Furstenberg, wearing nothing designed by her mother, didn’t have either fashion or glamour on the mind. She wasn’t at Abrons to pick out a piece to adorn her homes in Los Angeles and New York. Nor was it her own art she was showing off.

The drawings on the walls, most made with pencil or pen and one with Kool-Aid and an asthma inhaler, were contributions from people in the L.G.B.T. community who are, or were recently, incarcerated in the American prison system. For Ms. von Furstenberg, they reflect a calling very different from her mother’s.

The show, called “On the Inside” and on view through Dec. 18, has been more than four years in the making and is a collaboration between Ms. von Furstenberg and Black and Pink, a grass-roots organization that provides a network of support for L.G.B.T. inmates and works to abolish the prison system.

“I’m not a volunteering type of person,” said Ms. von Furstenberg, who began studying media and comparative literature at Brown University at 16, and whose past projects include opening Steinberg and Sons, a clothing boutique in Los Angeles that’s now closed; recording music as the lead singer in a band called Playdate; and, more recently, writing, directing and producing two films, one a short (“Tyrolean Riviera”) and one a feature (“Tanner Hall”).

So how did a nonvolunteering type end up doing something that so closely resembles volunteering?

“I didn’t know what I wanted to do after ‘Tanner Hall,’ so I went to a gestalt storytelling workshop, and we talked how important it is to cultivate a culture of compassion,” she said. “Stories connect people and can ignite humanity.”

Though Ms. von Furstenberg’s interests and activities have ranged across quite a spectrum (her best friend and creative partner on “Tanner Hall,” Francesca Gregorini, said, “She’s always been, out of all of our friends, the most of a Renaissance woman”), she realized her drive to tell stories was the common thread.

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