Tamms Year Ten’s Supermax Subscriptions may sound...

Tamms Year Ten’s Supermax Subscriptions may sound more like a project for political or social change than an artwork, but the project was born of several groups of people whose artistic practice informs their political work, including Temporary Services and artist Sarah Ross. Organized with the Tamms Poetry Committee of Tamms Year Ten, an organization committed to advocacy on behalf of prisoners in the Tamms supermax security prison in Illinois, the Supermax Subscriptions project works to bring a little bit of the outside world into the cells of prisoners incarcerated in permanent solitary confinement. Various human rights and mental health groups have determined permanent solitary confinement as inhumane, and many prisoners in Tamms are being held there while waiting for or in spite of other sentencing. Supermax Subscriptions asks people to use their frequent flier miles to purchase magazine subscriptions to improve the quality of life of inmates who may only leave their cell 2-5 times a week to shower and exercise, also in enclosed spaces with only a slice of sky visible.

I think of this and other Tamms Year Ten initiatives (like their Photos for prisoners project) as a way to use creative problem solving for social change that might otherwise be put towards visual arts practice. Thinking about these projects under the heading of art also encourages us to expand how and to what ends we create art for. People often speak of arts’ ability to strengthen community and bring beauty into others’ lives, and I believe Tamms Year Ten is working towards those ends, just not in terms of conventional visual practice.

Posted by bespangled