roots: Solitary Gardens
Solitary Gardens is a social practice and national garden initiative that cultivates conversations around alternatives to incarceration by catalyzing compassion. This project directly and metaphorically asks us to imagine a landscape without prisons.
Fueled by the desire to keep Herman’s legacy alive, jackie began the Solitary Gardens. The Solitary Gardens are a collaborative social practice project that seed important conversations around alternatives to incarceration. Centered around abolitionist pedagogy, this project directly and metaphorically, asks us to imagine a landscape without prisons. Solitary Gardens has received funding and support from Art for Justice, Creative Capital Foundation, The Ford Foundation, Threshold Foundation, Rauschenberg Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation, as well as, national attention and the accolades of important people including Colin Kaepernick, Angela Davis, Bryan Stevenson, Rick Raemesch, Mel Chin, Ben Cohen, Joaquin Phoenix and Susan Sarandon.
Utilizing the tools of prison abolition, art, permaculture, and transformative justice to facilitate exchanges between incarcerated persons and volunteers on the “outside.” Solitary Gardens are built from the largest chattel crops (sugarcane, cotton, and tobacco) and are the same size as a standard solitary prison cell, illustrating the evolution of chattel slavery into mass incarceration. The contents of the beds are designed by currently incarcerated individuals, known as Solitary Gardeners. As the garden beds mature, the prison architecture is overpowered by plant life, proving that nature—like hope and compassion—will ultimately triumph over the harm humans impose on the planet.
The Solitary Gardens, in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, LA. The Solitary Gardens utilize the tools of prison abolition, permaculture, and alternative education to facilitate unexpected exchanges between incarcerated folx in solitary confinement and volunteers on the “outside.” Each 6’ x 9’ garden bed maintains the blueprint of a standard U.S. solitary confinement cell(5). The beds are designed and remotely gardened by incarcerated collaborators, known as Solitary Gardeners. Through growing almanacs, written and photographic exchanges, and occasional prison visits, we translate prisoners’ imaginations into the ground as we grow plants of their choosing.
As prisons are the descendants of slavery, the garden beds are constructed from the ancestral byproducts of sugarcane, cotton, and tobacco, exposing the illusion that slavery was abolished in the U.S. These former chattel slave crops are grown on-site, milled down, mixed with a special non-hydraulic lime and then, through a rammed earth process, sculpted into a form to produce the walls and components of the prison-cell-turned-garden-bed. The Solitary Gardens are part of a social practice that cultivates conversations around alternatives to incarceration by catalyzing compassion. When building The Solitary Gardens we transform America’s chattel crops into a wholistic outcome. This process allows us to reconcile our violent past with the implications on the present, and collectively construct a very different future. The Solitary Gardens directly and metaphorically asks us to imagine a landscape without prisons. As the gardens mature, the prison architecture is overpowered by plant life, proving that nature—like hope, love, and imagination—will ultimately triumph over the harm humans impose on ourselves and on the planet.