Solitary Garden is the participatory public sculpture and garden project by award-winning artist jackie sumell. Solitary Garden creatively advocates for the end of solitary confinement and mass incarceration in the United States and asks viewers and participants "to imagine a landscape without prisons."

Solitary Garden features a sculpture made following the blueprint of a standard U.S. solitary confinement cell. Around the 6’ x 9’ cell grows a garden of flowers and vegetables, designed by Tim Young, currently incarcerated in San Quentin, and communicated via letters and drawings to the students and volunteers who are planting and tending the garden as his proxies. The intent of the project, as the artist and Tim Young explain, is to "imagine a landscape without prisons."

The garden continues to grow at UC Santa Cruz, despite current shelter-in-place requirements. Please use the resources below to experience the project and to learn more about the issues it engages. And write Tim: Timothy Young, #F23374, San Quentin State Prison, San Quentin, CA 94974.

Experience Solitary Garden online through a short video created by IAS undergraduate interns. (An extended version is HERE.)

FURTHER RESOURCES

Tim has written letters to the Solitary Garden team at UC Santa Cruz since August 2019. From his first thoughts on undertaking a garden and his ideas on the significance of the plants he's chosen, to recent writings on how COVID-19 has changed the project for him, the powerful letters are online: Tim Young's letters and other writings

Solitary Garden is in UC Santa Cruz Magazine: "A Growing Movement" by Peggy Townsend