The Sesnon Gallery Speak Up Series aims to provide a safe space for students and the UCSC community to engage with ideas generated from the exhibition Barring Freedom and beyond. The Sesnon Gallery at UC Santa Cruz encourages interdisciplinary discourse through the lens of the arts. 

November 18, 2020, 5:30-6:45 p.m. PST
Sesnon Speak Up: Planting Abolition
Register here

A brief introduction to the Solitary Garden by IAS staff followed by planting abolition discussion facilitated by Art Department alum, Color Study Group. Learn about the Solitary Garden at UC Santa Cruz, a participatory public sculpture and garden project by award-winning artist jackie sumell in collaboration with Tim Young, who is currently on Death Row in San Quentin State Prison. Participate in a discussion on how planting can relate to a broader vision of a landscape without prisons. If abolition is about building new systems, modes of being, and networks of care that make prisons obsolete, in what ways goes gardening fit into a broader abolitionist agenda? In what ways does relationship building with plants – through creative, embodied use of them – align with “planting” abolition?

About the Color Study Group

CSG was born from a desire to investigate the materiality of color. We are a group of UC Santa Cruz Art Department students and graduates and we interrogate the cultural, psychological, and metaphysical implications of color. Our interests in color and the world it inhabits are ever-expanding, but as of late this group is most focused on natural dyeing and the planting of a community dye garden. We see plants as comrades in abolition, and see the freedom of land, the freedom of all those imprisoned by the state, and collective liberation as intrinsically linked.