San Quentin Archive
In 1999, at the tail end of a trip to Saint Petersburg, Russia, the artist Nigel Poor found herself standing outside Kresty Prison, the infamous eighteenth-century compound where Leon Trotsky was once held and Anna Akhmatova visited her incarcerated son. Scattered on the ground were dozens of paper cones, weighed down with pieces of bread, small missives tossed out by those behind Kresty’s brick walls. Poor bent down, picked up one of the cones, and took it back home to San Francisco. She has never opened it up. “I wanted to live with the mystery,” she told me one morning as she sat in her car, preparing to make a now frequent commute to California’s San Quentin State
