Good afternoon everyone,

How are you? I have found out about an amazing/moving art project this week that I have to share with you. This is from Sara Hendren's terrific newsletter, undefended/undefeated, so if that's not one you're subscribed to it's definitely worth it.

Here's the write up of the project itself:

The artist Laurie Jo Reynolds was one of the chief organizers on this five-year project initiated to close Illinois’s “super max” Tamms prison—where an extreme, truly unimaginable style of solitary confinement was carried out for 15 years. Inmates were first brought to Tamms from other prisons as a radical, one-year measure of shock treatment for behavioral concerns. While there, they had almost no interpersonal contact at all: no group activities, no phone calls, meals pushed through the door, and exercise carried out alone. But what had been designed as a temporary measure often turned into long-term solitary. Tamms opened its doors in 1998. By 2008, about a quarter of the 500 men inside had been held there for the entire decade. Tamms Year Ten was a coalition of people who lobbied, cajoled, pressured, protested, collaborated, organized, photographed, wrote letters, and did a hundred other incremental, patient tasks to get Tamms closed down. And in 2013, they succeeded.

https://sarahendren.substack.com/p/four-words-for-the-art-you-love-part

A really intense description of one of her group's interventions here - three people stood onstage for a minute for every year they (or in one case their still-incarcerated son) were in solitary confinement. If you think about being in a meeting, people start to feel uncomfortable with silence after five seconds, so a minute is, in the context of our ideas of "an event", a very long time to sit with the idea of solitary confinement:

Someone dimmed the house lights; as silence thickened around us, the air grew colder and more still. The only movement seemed to be the dust mites in the stage lights focused on Townsend, Berry and Cannon and the small changes in posture as they shifted weight from one foot to the other, heads bowed. Slowly, as the seconds elapsed, I became aware of noises from the audience; first the unmistakable sniffing back of tears and next a murmur of whispers a few rows behind me. Just as the whispering grew louder and someone uttered a sharp, outraged “Shhhh!”—six people in the front section of the auditorium stood up. And then a few more. And so on, until a good half of the audience stood facing the three onstage. Townsend was crying where she stood. The man seated next to me, who had been making watercolor sketches of the proceedings using a plastic miniature palette, had tears streaming down his face as well. I stood but did not cry; the truth of this “moment of endurance” was too dark, too real, too not mine. Berry departed the stage first, then Cannon; Townsend was there alone for what felt like hours, 14 minutes in all for each of the years her son lived in solitary confinement.

http://brooklynquarterly.org/on-legislative-art-laurie-jo-reynolds-and-tamms-year-ten/

Another of Reynold's projects was Photo Requests from Solitary - prisoners ask for a photograph of anything, complicated or simple, and people pick up their requests and send photos. You can browse the whole site here:

http://photorequestsfromsolitary.org/

I particularly engaged with this one:

A face-shot of a woman with a smile that shines as bright as the sun. Not a model type but an everyday ordinary woman who, perhaps, enjoys every moment of life. Who is not bias or judgmental towards anyone but full of love & compassion for everyone & everything.

http://photorequestsfromsolitary.org/125-2/

This was a more intense Fem Fri than usual so I hope you enjoyed it. All change next week, as always. :)

Love,

Alex.