Fleetwood 2020
Fleetwood, Nicole R. Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020.
What I learned is that art in prison is a practice of survival, an aesthetic journey that documents time in captivity, a mode of connecting with others, but it does not resolve the injustices rooted in the carceral system.
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This book focuses on the art and aesthetic experiments of people imprisoned in the massive labyrinth of domestic jails and prisons in the United States. It ex- plores the creative practices that incarcerated people cultivate and the relation- ships forged through art-making. I foreground the experiments, experiences, and conceptualization of incarcerated artists in order to present prison art as central to the contemporary art world and as a manifestation and critique of the carce…
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The painting is an e ample of what I call “carceral aesthetics,” which refers to ways of envisioning and crafting art and culture that reflect the conditions of imprisonment.
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Every year, incarcerated people create millions of paintings, drawings, sculptures, greeting cards, collages, and other visual materials that circulate inside prisons; between incarcerated people and their loved ones; in private collections of the imprisoned, prison staff, teachers, and others; and more recently in public domains and insti- tutions like museums, libraries, hospitals, and universities. Prison art is pro…
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in a number of ways and for different audiences: through programs run by prisons, through organizations that bring art instruction and services into prisons, through formal and informal networks of incarcerated people who share art and supplies, and through collaborations between incarcerated people and nonincarcerated art- ists, allies, relatives, and friends. The majority of art-making in prisons takes place in cells and prison hobby shops, where incarcerated people improvise and experiment with the numerous constraints under which they serve penal ti…
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…the aesthetic engagement and knowledge worlds of people largely excluded from civic life, art establishments, and public culture— people warehoused in US prisons—through examining art by incarcerated people, both solo and in collaboration with nonincarcerated artists, activists, and teachers, practices that explore the expansive reach of the carceral state…
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Prison art practices resist the isolation, exploitation, and dehumanization of carceral facilities. They reconstitute what productivity and labor mean in states of captivity, as many of these works entail laborious, time-consuming, and immer- sive practices and plan…
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Like art made in other arenas, prison art exists in relation to economies, power structures governing resources and access, and discourses that legitimate certain works as art and others as craft, material object, historical artifact, or trash.
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Through artistic practices and c ative communities inside prison, incarcerated artists fight the punitive isolation and severance of relationships that prisons impose. They work to undermine the carceral indexes, meaning the data and records—like mug shots—that mark people as criminal and incarcerated subjects, and the stigma of being a prisoner. Prison art is part of the long history of captive people envisioning freedom— creating art, imagining worlds, and finding ways to resist and survive.
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This book curves and weaves around the aesthetic risks, experimentations, and practices of incarcerated people who imagine, create, and produce under a system of punishment so brutal that most of the nonincarcerated public cannot even conceive of it.
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Incarcerated artists deliberately take the status of being labeled a social problem or failure as the very grounds for their artistic experimentation. Failure amplifies their aesthetic improvisations and the risks they will take to produce works and worlds that exceed the prison.
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The framework of rehabilitative arts does not address the larger structural and political relationships that I attempt to map between art, aesthetics, and the carceral state.
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In the state of Ohio, for example, prisons take 20 percent of all art sales. Art made by the imprisoned can be quite lucrative for some insti- tutions, and art workshops and education can function as ways of managing people held captive so that they do not challenge prison authority. At Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola, prison art is widely sold at the biannual rodeo show, bringing in significant profit to the institution and a percentage to incarcerated people who can use it toward commis- sary or can send it home to…
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How does art made in captivity challenge familiar assumptions about what it means to be imprisoned while still revealing the institutional constraints out of which it emerges?
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He noted that his artwork changed significantly when he went to prison because of the setting, the regulation of time, the constant presence of correction officers, and the limited access to materials—all of which altered his aesthetic ho- rizon. For him, penal time, penal matter, and penal space led to a more delib- erate, repetitive, and sometimes even mechanical process—one that produced labor-intensive, time-laden works that he would not have made outside punitive cap…
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The nonincarcerated public comes to recognize prison and the imprisoned almost exclusively through a set of rehearsed images created by the state and by nonincarcerated image makers—images like arrest photos, mug shots, the minimal furnishings of the prison cell, fortress-like walls, barbed wire, bars, metal doors, and the executioner’s chair.
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The power of the state to arrest and capture, to make visible and invisible, un- derscores the significance of visuality as a tool of state authority that structures who sees and what can be seen. 22Prison thrives on limiting the field of vision of imprisoned people and the nonincarcerated public, and in many respects those who work on behalf of the carceral state, though in very different way…
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I was struck by the fact that every person I interviewed spoke of how making art created a com- munity and sense of belonging for them. They spoke of making art in captivity as a relational practice that fostered friendships among incarcerated people, and sometimes with prison staff and art teachers. They discussed how making art strengthened connections between incarcerated people and their nonincarcerated family, loved ones, and personal networ…
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The juxtaposition between the built environment of the penitentiary and the art of Smith and Craig sets up a relationship between the system of locking people away as punishment and the imaginary worlds and creative practices of those held there.
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The creative practices of incarcerated people fundamentally challenge aesthetic traditions that link art and discernment to the free, mobile, white, Western man. Instead, carceral aesthetics often involves rendering “one’s self out of sight,” to borrow a phrase from theorist Simone Browne, or being forcibly rendered out of sight, to imagine and then clandestinely construct other worlds, ones that speak to and through captivity.
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Both prisons and museums emerge as late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century institutions that were created as technologies of state power to manage and order populations, and to cultivate a notion of the citizen subject who would assent or be discipli…
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Early museums, as Tony Bennett discusses in his history of the museum, often incorporated exhibitions of historic forms of punishment, like displays of scaf- folds and cat-o’-nine-tails; he suggests that the exhibits legitimated the peniten- tiary as a corollary institution of Western d…
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Built a short distance from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which was established in 1805 as the first art museum in the nation, the Eastern State Penitentiary was one of the first penitentiaries.
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Eastern State’s practice of bringing in prisoners hooded so that they could not see or be seen reinforces both the stakes of visu- ality as a tool of state power and the aesthetic project of prisons to control to an excruciating degree the sensory experience of the impriso…
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Aesthetics as conceived in the Enlightenment era developed in tandem with the museum and the prison.
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Aesthetics was foundational to the development of the liberal citizen subject, a category that excluded enslaved and exploited peoples, indigenous peoples, colonized peoples, women of all races, and the crimi- nalized.
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American systems of penality grow out of discourses on race that conceptu- alize black subjects as nonhuman and inherently criminal. The development of American prisons cannot be disentangled from racial capitalism, the architecture and systems of confinement of the slave plantation, and the normative public’s representation of racial violence and captivity to discipline black s…
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26Relatedly, carceral aesthetics offers conceptions of r tionality that disavow the systems of value / worth, criminalization, and punitive governance of dominant Western art institutions and aesthetics.
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Carceral aesthetics foregrounds relational modes that emerge inside prisons and are initi- ated by incarcerated people, and that often are devalued and ignored by art estab- lishments. They are practices that project across carceral divides and that create meaningful engagement not bound …
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The institution so rigorously governs what one can access that any work of art that emerges in prison is an example of an artist’s attempt to manipu- late and work within or around penal constraint.
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“Mushfake” and “procurement” are two terms used by incarcerated people to de- scribe the processes of turning penal matter into art. “Mushfake” refers to “do-it- yourself” objects made from materials acquired in prison, especially contraband objects. They tend to be versions of items found outside prison, like knives, screw- drivers, picture frames, or cigarett…
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Prison newsletters, such as The Angolite and El Aztlán de Leavenworth, historically have been important, prisoner-led vehicles for organ- izing, consciousness raising, sharing information on prison conditions, and also for distributing art. These influences are part of what I loosely call “a pedagogy of the incarcerated,” which includes forms of peer education, reading groups, labor and rights organizing, and dialogues among incarcerated people that cross the boundaries used by prison administrators to manage and segregate populat…
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Contemporary prison art collectives, like the literary and art journal Prison Re- naissance, published by incarcerated people at San Quentin State Prison and their nonincarcerated allies, grow out of these traditions. They organize and operate to resist the enforced racial segregation in US prisons and to work around the bar- riers that separate prisoners from the general pu…
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The term “ inal index” refers to a range of data collected by the state to mark, register, classify, and surveil subjects labeled as criminals. The criminal index works in tandem with what theorist and historian Tina Campt calls “the racialized index,” which produces “subjects to be seen, read, touched, and consumed as available and abject flesh ob- jects and commodities, rather than as individual bodies, agents, or actors…
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The captive / captured subject and the mobile photographer temporarily both occupy penal space in a series of ex- changes, yet they remain unequal by status, and their relationship is mediated through the camera lens and prison authority.
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So photos of the imprisoned are always negotiations between people who are captives of the state and photog- raphers who enter prisons with the purpose of documenting their captivity.
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The mug shot used to be called a “rogues’ gallery photo,” a reference to “the room in the po- lice station where photographs of suspects and criminals were displayed in the 19th century.” 9The museum’s collection reflects the rise of photography as the dom…
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Alphonse Bertillon, a French criminologist who is credited with developing the mug shot, considered the body and physical traits of the criminal as identifiable and measurable; in 1888 he developed a system of identification called Bertil- lonage, which was soon widely adopted by police departments in several na…
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… 14While many of Bertillon’s theories and methods have been debunked, his research led to the growth of biometrics, techniques of measuring and iden- tifying people that are commonly used by law enforcement, military divisions, se- curity forces, and corpo…
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Portraiture is one of the most common genres of art-making inside prisons and one of the most fre- quently collected forms of prison art, on both the inside and the outside. It is a genre of primary significance to, for, and about incarcerated people.
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Through portraiture, the imprisoned claim the right not only to look but also to represent themselves and others. Not only do they sense and observe within the confines of penal space and time; they also discern and manifest meaning about subjectivity through the creative use of penal matter to make their art. They take creative license to produce representations of others, even while held captive as prisoners, a status rendering them vulnerable, othered, and unfree.
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Prison art collaborations allow for new relational practices to form between in- carcerated and nonincarcerated groups as they communicate, work together, and envision through, and often against, the punitive regulations of the state. Collabora- tions between incarcerated people and nonincarcerated artists and organizations serve as a significant means by which prison art circulates among nonincarcer- ated people, and show how the concept of carceral aesthetics emerges across various states of un / freedom. They also involve negotiations of pen…
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But prison arts collaborations can also turn on power dynamics in which the nonincarcerated are deemed as artists while the incarcerated participants are the subject matter or objects of art. 7And in so doing, they can rely on and reinforce the ideologies of rehabilitation and punitive correction that are embedded in the origins of the penitentiary and that still continue.
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…because they need to be approved by prisons in order to take place, many collaborations focus on personal exploration and individualized notions of reha- bilitation while avoiding or obfuscating political and systemic critiques of incar- ceration. The concern here is that art-making becomes a tool of the prison to manage and control po…
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” 9While these collaborations create immense possibility for new forms of relationality and a future without human caging, many of them depend on carcerality and its en- during justification of imprisonment.
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When these power differences are not carefully considered, and when the collaborative process reinforces inequality, the project itself can contribute to a voyeuristic fascination with prison life and prisoners as aberrant and even non- human, while playing into normative Western aesthetic traditions that link art to freedom, in particular ideas about freedom of expression and associati…
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“Fraught imaginaries” is a concept that I develop to consider the complex dynamics and power structures that shape artistic collaborations between nonincarcerated professional artists, nonprofit arts organizations, and incarcerated artists, stu- dents, and participan…
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…we must attend to how the structures of nonprofit arts and serv organizations and carceral institutions work in tandem to define what collabora- tion means, who is being served, and how art projects can be instrumentalized to reproduce both institutions as sites of containment where social, cultural, and political value are unequally di…
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While we need forms of public engagement that do not separate incarcer- ated people from the nonincarcerated, we also need to be careful that prison art collaborations do not rely on a notion of art as intrinsically transformative or on a relationship to prisons that reinforces their power and function to dic- tate who is captive and who is free. Moreover, we need to interrogate liberal hu- manist assumptions about what it means to collaborate between “prisoner” and “artist,” when such collaborations obfuscate paid labor (artists and organizations) and unpaid labor (incarcerated people) and promote both idealized and puni- tive notions about the rehabilitative role of art for the most marginalized and criminalized individuals, leaving carce…
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Many directors and administrators of prison arts p grams spoke candidly and with ethical concern about how the success of their organizations depends on having sizable prison populations; it is largely the prison boom that has driven the growth in arts programming in recent years.
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Writing about education p grams, including one in which he works, scholar Anoop Mirpuri wonders “how neoliberalism’s economic and ideological dependence on policing, prisons, and carceral technologies elicits forms of oppositional scholarship and critical engage- ment that ratify liberal procedures of valorization and value accumulation at the heart of racial capita…
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Is consent to participate in an arts program possible when one party is financially compensated and professionally rewarded while the other is held in punitive captivity?
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Another prison administrator recalled an i carcerated person stating, “They are using us,” when she pitched the proposal of a collaboration by a group of prominent artists who had already secured funding. The imprisoned man was aware of how the captivity of some served to buttress the careers of others.
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I propose that we consider how these c orations can be reimagined to change the outcomes and goals of participatory art practices from a scenario where some return to cages and others to their private homes. Instead, how can such programs help promote the fullest human capacity of the incarcerated millions? This entails in part a reassessment of what collabo- ration involves, especially between people who are differently situated in states of un / freedom, captivity, and access to resources and institutions. It starts with an understanding of collaboration that acknowledges the different stakes of its partners and that creates practices that are not just about survival or scarcity, but about the flourishing and freedom of all participants, to paraphrase writer and activist Adrienne Maree…
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In many prisons during the 1970s, administrators used cultural and educa- tional programs to manage, control, and occupy growing prison populations and to deter activists from staging large-scale protests. In some respects, prison arts and education programming was meant to squelch the revolutionary ideology of the Attica Brothers and even the …
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Collaborations that require funding from departments of correction and whose organizational struc- ture is embedded in the state may have more access to incarcerated participants and to penal spaces and resources when budgets and political attitudes are sup- portive, but they are vulnerable to changing funding priorities of state budgets. And often, they have to operate under a correction model of working with incar-…
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Instead of distracting from or obfuscating the fundamental wrongness of prisons and caging, can prison arts collaborations build new imaginary horizons by forming relations, ways of looking, and practices of interdependence that chal- lenge the institutional brutality and punitive discourse separating the incarcer- ated from the noni…
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To manage penal time and to maintain a relationship with himself as a subject and witness to his life in isolation, he made collages—hundreds of them. They were constructed with minimal materials—white legal paper, Elmer’s glue, news- print—and with the use of a copying machine to which Lutalo had restricted ac- cess, one of his rights to allow him to reproduce legal documents. Influenced by the art of Emory Douglas, the minister of culture for the Black Panther Party who created many of the organization’s most iconic posters, Lutalo calls his collages “visual propaganda”; more than simply works of art, they are tools to spread po- litical m…
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As the carceral state worked to eviscerate all relationality for him on behalf of poli- tics, his practice of collage-making worked against state authority.
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…these photos serve an important function outside prison walls; they circulate as practices of intimacy and attachment between incarcerated people and their loved ones. As one of the only forms of photographic production that incar- cerated people can willingly engage in, vernacular prison photos are a significant component of the visual culture of mass incarceration. They are photographic ac- counts of the lived presence of people held in punitive captivity who are rendered invisible and removed from civil society and fami…
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Vernacular prison portraits provide an important counterpoint to a long his- tory of photographing imprisoned people as part of carceral indexes. The most prevalent and available images of criminalized and incarcerated populations are those used in the service of carceral institutions to identify, monitor, and confine subjects, such as mug shots and prison ID photos (see Chapter 3). Prison studio photos are crucial modes of self-representation that serve as shadow archives to governmental indexes of criminalized peopl…
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The prison photograph is processed and c lated through the lens of the penal institution. This visual and haptic artifact doc- uments the state’s continued restructuring and disarticulation of black, Latino, indigenous, and poor white families. Photographs from the visiting room of prisons complicate the documentation of family life for many who are or whose relatives are under the jurisdiction of correctional authorities. In them, the free and unfree pose together in front of fantasy backdrops; they mark time togeth…
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