Seeing Through Stone: Sonny Trujillo’s Voice from Within
Remy Francisco, October 25, 2024 At 63 years old, Sonny Trujillo stands upon a collapsed prison surveillance tower. He paces five steps...
Award-winning artist jackie sumell works collaboratively with people incarcerated across the U.S. to promote abolition. Albert Woodfox is an activist and author who spent decades in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Tim Young is a poet and activist currently on San Quentin’s Death Row and sumell’s collaborator on UC Santa Cruz’s Solitary Garden. Together, they will discuss the activism and collaborations taking place between people inside and outside of prisons to, as sumell puts it, “imagine a landscape without prisons.”
Abolition from the Inside Out
w/ jackie sumell, Albert Woodfox, and Tim Young
Featured Music Performance – José James
April 13, 2021, 4-5:30 p.m.
Online event: Registration required
REGISTER HERE
Visualizing Abolition is a series of online events organized by Dr. Rachel Nelson, Director, Institute of the Arts and Sciences and Professor Gina Dent, Feminist Studies. The events accompany Barring Freedom, an exhibition of contemporary art on view at San José Museum of Art October 30, 2020-March 21, 2021. Solitary Garden, a public art project about mass incarceration and solitary confinement, is concurrently on view at UC Santa Cruz.
Sadie Barnette earned her BFA from CalArts and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally and is in the permanent collections of museums such as LACMA, Berkeley Art Museum, the California African American Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem (where she was also Artist-in-Residence), Brooklyn Museum and the Guggenheim. She is the recipient of Art Matters and Artadia awards and has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Artforum, and Vogue. She lives in Oakland, CA and is represented by Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles and Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco.
Albert Woodfox is an activist and the author of “Solitary,” a 2019 National Book Award finalist. Known as one of the Angola Three, along with Robert King and Herman Wallace, Woodfox served nearly 44 years in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. He was released in 2016. Woodfox was a committed activist in prison, he remains so today, speaking to a wide array of audiences, including the Innocence Project, Harvard, Yale, and other universities, the National Lawyers Guild, as well as at Amnesty International events in London, Paris, Denmark, Sweden, and Belgium.
Timothy James Young is a writer, activist, and a wrongfully convicted prisoner on Death Row. He was arrested in April of 1999 for a crime that he did not commit and was subsequently sentenced to Death Row in April of 2006. He is now partaking in the Appellate process as a means of proving his innocence and regaining his freedom. Tim is a collaborator in Solitary Garden, a participatory public sculpture and garden project by award-winning artist jackie sumell. The sculpture follows the blueprint of a 6’x9’ U.S. solitary confinement cell similar to the one that Tim has been confined to for twenty-one years. The cell is surrounded by a garden which Tim designed via letters and drawings to students and volunteers, who cultivate it as his proxies.Tim’s writings have been featured in the San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper.
Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. The series has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
Partners include: Howard University School of Law, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Indexical, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and Media and Society, Kresge College.
