Lecture: Nicole Fleetwood (Webinar)

Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration investigates the impact of the carceral state on American life through the lens of art and visual culture. The multi-platform project grows out of a decade of research by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, curator and professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University. Marking Time  encompasses a highly praised book featuring close to 70 artists, a major survey exhibition at MoMA PS1, and ongoing public programs and collaborations highlighting artists working to end mass incarceration and issues impacting imprisoned people, their loved ones and communities.

Marking Time grows out of groundbreaking research on contemporary culture, art, and the carceral state including interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated artists. Each initiative of this ongoing project foregrounds the creativity, activism, coalition building, and visions of freedom of directly impacted people. Working with meager supplies and in the harshest conditions, imprisoned artists find ways to resist the brutality and isolation that prisons engender. Their bold works reveal new possibilities in American art and help to foster a society beyond imprisonment.

Nicole R. Fleetwood is a writer, curator, and professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her books are Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020), On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015), and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011).  She is co-editor of Aperture magazine’s “Prison Nation,” a special issue focusing on photography’s role in documenting mass incarceration, and co-curator of Aperture’s touring exhibition of the same title.  Fleetwood has co/curated exhibitions and programs on art and mass incarceration at the Andrew Freedman Home, Aperture Foundation, Cleveland Public Library, Eastern State Penitentiary, MoMA PS1, Mural Arts Philadelphia, the Zimmerli Art Museum, and the Urban Justice Center.  Her work has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, NYPL’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, ACLS, Whiting Foundation, Denniston Hill Residency, Schomburg Center for Scholars-in-Residence, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the NEH.

Tameca Cole, Locked in a Dark Calm, 2016. Collection of Ellen Driscoll