Herman Wallace has been in solitary confinement at Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana (USA) for 34 years. At Angola this entails spending 23 hours per day in a two-by-three-metre cell. Wallace, an active member of the Black Panthers, received a life sentence without possibility of parole after he was convicted for the murder of a prison guard with evidence later proven to have been purchased from another prisoner.

His incarceration, along with other members of the “Angola 3”, became an international symbol of the perpetuation of slavery by another name via the US Constitution’s 13th Amendment. Angola , or the Louisiana State Prison is a former slave breeding plantation; the average prison sentence is 88 years, 90 % of the prisoners will die there, 77 % of the prison population are black.

Jackie Sumell contacted Herman through Robert King, an ex-prisoner at Angola who served 31 years for a crime he did not commit – 29 of them in solitary confinement. King was released in 2001 and actively campaigned on behalf of his comrades to raise public awareness of conditions in US prisons. Wallace, King and Albert Woodfox, all Black Panthers, are known as the Angola Three. In November 2002, after months of correspondence, Jackie asked Herman a simple question: “What kind of house does a man who has been kept in a six-by-nine-foot cell for over 30 years dream of?”

The answer is contained in an incredible exchange: through letters,drawings, several phone calls and visits to the prison, the artist and activist Jackie Sumell has given voice and substance to Herman Wallace’s imagination.

Her project to imagine and design Herman’s House became a platform for sharing the inhuman conditions of solitary confinement with the world. Herman Wallace was exonerated of his “crimes” in 2013 and released. He passed away three days later.