An Abolitionist Garden Grows at MoMA PS1
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"Grow plants, not prisons." That’s the phrase featured on the back of jackie sumell's sweatshirt (the artist prefers her name in all lower case). She's carefully misting flower beds in MoMA PS1's courtyard, where the green vines of said beds are slowly growing up the surrounding concrete walls. In the center is a small greenhouse. It’s part of an exhibit called Growing Abolition, and it’s the size of a solitary confinement cell at ADX Florence, America’s highest-security prison. All ADX residents are kept in solitary confinement—a type of punishment deemed a form of torture by the UN—for 23 hours every day. Their only connection to the outdoors is a four-inch wide slit that gives them no sense of their own location or even the sun in the sky.
sumell finishes a garden task, sits down next to me at one of the courtyard’s many picnic tables, and tells me the story of how she came to be a gardener—and an abolitionist.
Herman Wallace spent 41 years in solitary confinement. Around year 29 of his sentence, sumell wrote him asking what house he dreamt of after having spent decades in a 6’ x 9’ cell. His response read: “I can clearly see the gardens and they will be full of Gloxinia, delphiniums, and roses. I wish for guests to be able to smile and walk through the gardens all year round.” So, sumell built him a garden. She had first encountered the late Wallace through a community organizer friend in San Francisco, where she was in her first year of graduate school. “At that point in my life, I was angry, upset, and disappointed with the world—I responded with rage,” she says. But then she saw Robert King speak. King, alongside Wallace, was one of the three residents (“The Angola 3”) of Louisiana State Penitentiary (“Angola”) wrongfully incarcerated and forced to spend decades in solitary confinement. King was the first individual of the Angola 3 to be released in 2001 when his conviction was overturned after 31 years incarcerated, 29 of which were spent in solitary confinement.“I sat in front of someone who had just spent 29 years in solitary confinement for something he couldn't have possibly done…and he wasn't visibly angry,” sumell says. She began regularly corresponding with the three men and ultimately moved to New Orleans to be closer to them. Wallace was eventually released, but died three days after experiencing physical freedom. In order to, in sumell’s words, “uphold the life and legacy of Herman,” Solitary Gardens was born.
Like her first collaboration with Wallace—a project that came to be known as The House that Herman Built—sumell’s project has gathered communities all over the US to create public, green spaces designed by individuals currently in solitary confinement. sumell and her team will write to folks who are currently being detained in solitary, inviting them to design a garden that a team of volunteer gardeners on the outside will eventually plant and grow. One solitary gardener, Mike LeBlanc, had not even been home one week when he made his way to a garden to work with other volunteers. While working, he noticed a sign that said Abolition for the People. “While I was incarcerated, at times I would feel that I was lost in 6000 numbers,” he shares over the phone. “That [sign] reminded me of that feeling, knowing there were people on the outside fighting for me.” And while not all gardeners will be able to eventually visit their gardens, their work has been harvested by and even gone on to feed some of their family members. This, to sumell, is at the heart of abolition.
“A lot of times folks think of abolition as a destination, an achievement, or a set list of goals,” sumell says, “but it's an ongoing practice. And like anything you want to be better at, it requires daily attention and care, which is similar to a garden, right?” She compares the practice of abolition to noticing a small flower growing through the cracks of an abandoned building. Or how the vines of the exhibition are beginning to cover the drab courtyard walls. She goes on to describe the elements of ginger, how it’s often prescribed in traditional Chinese medicine formulas because it uniquely brings together methods of healing. “It’s a connector, a movement builder,” she says.
When museumgoers flock to the growing ginger bed, they’ll find a QR code that, when clicked on, will prompt the viewer to consider how they are a movement builder in their own community. As they travel to different beds—all planted by various community groups, from The North Bronx Collective to The Slow Factory—they will find different QR codes with different sets of questions. The goal being that, before jumping to how one can check off boxes to “achieve” abolition, viewers will start to consider what abolition looks like in their own lives first. “I had never learned about abolition before,” says 17-year-old Madison Colón, an intern with The Lower Eastside Girls Club, the New York nonprofit that serves as the main partner in Growing Abolition. “As I learned more about it, I really began to see the world differently.”
sumell acknowledges that this idea of seeing the world differently comes with time. She likens it to the act of lifting weights—you start small, and you practice over and over until you can lift your goal weight. “Abolition doesn't start with tearing down prison walls and institutions,” she emphasizes, “it starts with questioning your relationship to punishment, or the ways you police yourself.” Maybe you ask yourself why you find it necessary to yell at the person who cut you off in traffic, or you ask why New York spends half a million dollars just to incarcerate one person for one year. Eventually, she argues, after continuously examining the role punishment or anger or rage plays in your life and society at large, the idea of alternatives to incarceration doesn’t seem so foreign. You replace punishment with healing, the individual with the collective, confinement with supportive communities.
sumell’s exhibition at MoMA PS1 first came about after Elena González, PS1’s Assistant Curator who has collaborated directly on Growing Abolition, first saw her speak at another decarceration-related exhibit, Marking Time, curated by renowned scholar Nicole Fleetwood. “I was curious about the possibilities of gardening as a tool for exploring abolition and building community here at PS1,” González says. “I remember jackie asking, ‘Are you improving existing structures or tearing them down to create something that makes institutions obsolete? If we are actually trying to be radical…we can start with the infrastructure of PS1.’”
Growing Abolition’s greenhouse was built to illustrate the inhumanity of ADX Florence after sumell met a solitary gardener confined there. sumell encourages joy and possibility as a means of revolution, and the idea around Growing Abolition is to watch it spread over the next six months while on view at PS1. And when the greenhouse eventually comes down, the PS1 team says that the plants will go to exhibit collaborators who can then cultivate them in their own community gardens. Out of one garden will grow many.