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Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
by Nicole R. Fleetwood
A powerful document of the inner lives and creative visions of men and women rendered invisible by America's prison system.
More than two million people are currently behind bars in the United States. Incarceration not only separates the imprisoned from their families and communities; it also exposes them to shocking levels of deprivation and abuse and subjects them to the arbitrary cruelties of the criminal justice system. Yet, as Nicole Fleetwood reveals, America's prisons are filled with art. Despite the isolation and degradation they experience, the incarcerated are driven to assert their humanity in the face of a system that dehumanizes them.
Based on interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated artists, prison visits, and the author's own family experiences with the penal system, Marking Time shows how the imprisoned turn ordinary objects into elaborate works of art. Working with meager supplies and in the harshest conditions―including solitary confinement―these artists find ways to resist the brutality and depravity that prisons engender. The impact of their art, Fleetwood observes, can be felt far beyond prison walls. Their bold works, many of which are being published for the first time in this volume, have opened new possibilities in American art.
As the movement to transform the country's criminal justice system grows, art provides the imprisoned with a political voice. Their works testify to the economic and racial injustices that underpin American punishment and offer a new vision of freedom for the twenty-first century.
National Book Critics Circle Awards, 2020
"The beauty in these often painful images (like Muhammad al Ansi's 2016 untitled painting of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler who drowned as his family sought refuge across the Mediterranean) powerfully reclaims the visual idea of what it means to be imprisoned. Fleetwood seeks to revise the mainstream media narrative…by letting us see the diverse array of 'studio photos, handmade greeting cards, drawings and other pieces of art made by incarcerated people' that offer a story we on the outside have never really heard." - New York Times Book Review
"[Fleetwood] brings together an impressive array of paintings, sculptures, murals, and photos that speak to the impact of incarceration on American life…In amplifying the stories of those marked by incarceration, she makes visible the individuals and families the carceral state has tried so hard to disappear and silence." - Los Angeles Review of Books
"An urgently political text…Fleetwood's training as an art historian is evident, as her analysis follows a narrative arc that moves across artistic mediums and within the physical architecture of prison itself…Marking Time, however, never becomes too wrapped up in its own theory to forget that the prison industrial complex is a system of people, many of whom are the most vulnerable among us…Moves fluidly between this art historical survey and a sharp attention to the social apparatuses that have enabled the very foundation of the prison state."- Jessica Lynne, The Nation
"In her groundbreaking and expansive book…Fleetwood has created something of a foundational index of prison art, an incisive guide to the multitudinous practices, aesthetics, styles, and conditions of art made by those in captivity. Fleetwood makes evident simultaneously the unique conditions of prison and the unique features of the art that is made there. Critically, Fleetwood's book frees this art, and these artists, from prison as a delimited and marginalizing niche." - Rachel Kushner, Artforum
"A thoroughly researched and heartbreakingly personal look at prison art and the broader visual culture of incarceration…Woven throughout the book are striking illustrations of the work of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists…While prisoners have been largely excluded from public life, the art and images Fleetwood highlights function as material traces of the disappeared, who, through acts of creation, refuse to be rendered invisible." - Jackie Wang, Art in America
"It's so eloquently written and is the first book to explore art practices in proximity to the carceral state, representing more than a decade of research by Nicole and including the work of more than 70 artists." - Kate Fowle, Artnet News
"The United States has the largest population of captive human beings on the planet, some 2.5 million, in a prison-industrial complex that constitutes a punitive universe walled off the larger world. What takes place behind those walls? Deprivation and cruelty, but also art, as we learn from this absorbing book." - New York Times
"[An] ambitious book…Fleetwood deftly weaves personal narrative together with nuanced readings of artworks created by incarcerated people in order to illustrate how, in her own words, 'art in prison is a practice of survival, an aesthetic journey that documents time in captivity, a mode of connecting with others.'…She models how creative expression can build the coalitions necessary for imagining and realizing a more just society." - Smithsonian
"Illuminates the creative process of artists working behind bars… Incorporating the work of artists within several different mediums―from painting and sculpture, to photography and bricolage―Marking Time explores how the creation of art in prison can disrupt institutionalized patterns of dehumanization… Makes visible the lives, experiences, and creativity of the incarcerated, a population which, despite being over two-million in size, remains largely either ignored or disparaged." - Patrick Conway, Arts Fuse
"At its heart, Marking Time is an abolitionist text, arriving during the recent international surge of the Black Lives Matter movement with a picture of mass incarceration as the less visible, but always present counterpart to police brutality…Thoughtful and stylistically accessible, Marking Time is meant for a broad audience across the inmates' families, the academy, and the artworld…Frames art as a life-saving endeavor for many incarcerated artists." - Matthew Joseph Irwin, Momus
This information about Marking Time was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Nicole R. Fleetwood is Professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University. Her work on art and mass incarceration has been featured at the Aperture Foundation and the Zimmerli Museum of Art, and her exhibitions have been praised by the New York Times, The Nation, the Village Voice, and the New Yorker. She is the author of On Racial Icons and the prizewinning Troubling Vision.
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