Nicole Fleetwood will present on her decade-long research and programming on art made in captivity. Her book Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration explores the impact of the US prison system on contemporary visual art. The compendium exhibition highlights artists who are or have been incarcerated alongside artists who have not been incarcerated but whose practices interrogate the carceral state. Seen together, their works reveal how punitive governance, predatory policing, surveillance, and mass imprisonment impact everyday life for many millions of people. Art made in prisons is crucial to contemporary culture, though it has been largely excluded from established art institutions and public discourse. Marking Time aims to shift aesthetic currents, offering new ways to envision art and to understand the reach and devastation of the US carceral state.

About the Speaker: Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood is the Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication (NYU Steinhardt) and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis (NYU College of Arts and Science). A MacArthur Fellow, she is a writer, curator, and art critic interested in Black art and cultural history, aesthetics, photography, documentary studies, and art and activism. Dr. Fleetwood is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Harvard University Press, 2020) and is the curator of the eponymous traveling exhibition, which debuted at MoMA PS1 in September 2020.

Image: Pyrrhic Defeat, Mark Loughney, as installed at MoMA PS1

This lecture is part of the "Reparative Histories of Art", a project of the Department of History of Art & Architecture and funded by the A W Mellon Foundation.