Rachel Zarrow March 17, 2021Updated: March 18, 2021, 1:07 pm
An adaption of artist jackie sumell’s “Solitary Gardens” at UC Santa Cruz. The garden plots are meant to represent a solitary confinement cell, taking up the same 6-by-9-foot space. The plants, which are selected remotely by an incarcerated person in solitary confinement, only grow in the spaces where humans would usually be able to walk in the cell. Photo: R.R. Jones
In the 2017 book “How To Do Politics With Art,” Lilian Mathieu describes how the arts play an important role in protest.
“It provides material and symbolic resources,” the French sociologist writes. Art “contributes to movement framing, mobilizes constituencies, sensitizes the broader public, and produces social change by renewing cultural traditions.”
COVID-19 ripped through California’s oldest prison, San Quentin, after 121 men were transferred from the California Institution for Men in Chino in May. The outbreak became the deadliest in a California prison, leading to more than 2,200 infections and at least 28 deaths.
Graphic artist, comic book creator and self-described illustrative journalist Orlando Smith documented the terror that he and other inmates experienced during the outbreak, which collided with last summer’s uprisings.
Smith, 54, has been incarcerated more than 20 years, serving a 241-years-to-life sentence after a jury found him guilty of eight counts of second-degree robbery. During the pandemic lockdowns, inmates could not leave their cells, were fed boxed meals for weeks and showered once every few days.