RESISTING ISOLATION: ART IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT

Since his death in California State Prison, Corcoran, on July 22, 2013, Billy Sell’s self-portrait has been circulated widely by activists and watchdog groups working to end solitary confinement.¹ Sell was a participant in a massive hunger strike among people held in solitary confinement units that began in the supermax Pelican Bay State Prison and spread to other prisons, involving over thirty thousand incarcerated participants and receiving wide support among non incarcerated allies. The protest aimed to change the inhumane and torturous conditions of solitary confinement, where people in isolation units “are allowed no phone calls, no contact with loved