Jeanine Oleson (MFA Photo Faculty) Named Rema Hort Mann Foundation, 2016 Artist Community Engagement Grantee
Jeanine Oleson was named as a Rema Hort Mann Foundation, 2016 Artist Community Engagement Grantee for her collaborative work with “Photo Requests from Solitary”
What would a person in solitary confinement want to see?
People held in supermax prisons and solitary confinement units were invited to request an image of anything at all, real or imagined—and promised that artists on the outside would fulfill their requests.
The resulting photographs provide an archive of the hopes, memories, and interests of Americans who live locked in cells for 23 hours a day in extreme isolation and sensory deprivation—conditions that have been widely denounced as torture.
The Photo Requests from Solitary project was initiated in 2009 by Tamms Year Ten, a grassroots coalition of artists, advocates, family members and men formerly incarcerated in Tamms Correctional Center in southern Illinois, which was shuttered in 2013 after years of opposition.