Nicole Fleetwood on Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Date
Thu January 16th 2020, 5:30 - 7:00pm
Event Sponsor
Department of Art & Art History and Stanford Arts Institute
Location
Oshman Hall, McMurtry Building
Nicole Fleetwood on Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

The Department of Art & Art History presents the new speaker series, Living Art History: Race, Methodology & Praxis, featuring Nicole Fleetwood, professor of American studies and art history at Rutgers University. 

Professor Fleetwood will discuss her forthcoming book, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, which examines the impact of mass incarceration on contemporary art and culture. Focusing on art made in US prisons and in collaboration with artists and activists across the nation, she explores various aesthetic practices of incarcerated artists who use carceral space, penal matter, and juridical papers to produce art about carcerality. Her presentation considers how furtive planning and strategies of appropriating items of the state are employed to make prison art. She calls these numerous and overlapping aesthetic and political practices “carceral aesthetics.”

Nicole 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 (Harvard University Press, 2020), On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (Rutgers University Press, 2015), and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (University of Chicago Press, 2011). She is co-editor of Aperture magazine’s “Prison Nation,” a special issue focusing on photography’s role in documenting mass incarceration. Fleetwood has curated exhibitions and events on art and mass incarceration at the Andrew Freedman Home, Aperture, Cleveland Public Library, Zimmerli Art Museum, Mural Arts Philadelphia, Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, and the Urban Justice Center. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the NYPL’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, ACLS, the Whiting Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, Schomburg Center for Scholars-in-Residence, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation, NJ Council for the Humanities, and the NEH. 

Image: Russell Craig, Self Portrait, 2016.

VISITOR INFORMATION: Oshman Hall is located in the McMurtry Building on the Stanford campus at 355 Roth Way. Visitor parking is free after 4 pm on weekdays, except by the Oval. Alternatively, take the Caltrain to Palo Alto Transit Center and ride the free Stanford Marguerite Shuttle.

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