How long has it been since you’ve seen the moon, the sun, the sky?
from Counting the Skyless Days, 2021
When the four pieces of this work are laid flat on the ground (including the spaces in between), they form the size of the floor plan for the average solitary confinement cell. Nearly all solitary confinement cells are smaller than the size of a parking spot.
As you rotate through the room looking at these canvases, you are the hands of a clock that are hidden from view of those in solitary. Time continues to pass, even when there is a limited sense of day or night, and the cycle continues indefinitely.
This installation is left up for a week. During the week, the hues of the flowers bleed into the water, filling the surrounding water with redness.
Growing up as the child of immigrants, I always thought of the sky as my one lasting connection to my family overseas. Even when I couldn’t talk with my grandparents or cousins on the phone, I knew we were looking up at the same sky.
Courts usually don’t care about which spices are available to incarcerated people in commissary, whether they are allowed to talk in their Nani’s language on the phone, or what traditions they must reinvent.
The Archive in an Envelope, my attempt to work around the existing limitations, contains snippets of the oral history interviews, photos of artifacts, historical articles, and other materials that can be sent to people behind bars upon request.
The stories I’ve had the privilege of documenting tell us about our collective past, but they also nudge us to reject the systems that box us in, and to reimagine a better, freer world.
Savannah Kumar is a civil rights lawyer and community artist. Most of Savannah’s work uses abstract forms to represent oppressive spaces, policies, and practices. Savannah’s work invites viewers to grapple with the spatial, temporal, and emotional elements of violence that are often hidden from view. She believes that art has the power to bring hidden structures out of the shadows and into the light for public scrutiny.