Lifesaving and Abolitionism

Shifting the Frame on Prison Art

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. Nicole Fleetwood framed her appeal as a long-overdue reassessment of prison art and the people who make it. She populated her book with more than eighty illustrations, mostly by incarcerated artists, and based her research on interviews with these artists, and her own experiences with family members in prison. While considering and critiquing the prison industrial complex as a structure of intimidation and control, she marks the ways in which prison art already contributes to US cultural production and memory-making through the proliferation of exhibitions featuring prison art and the already massive audience of family, friends, cellmates, guards, and others who collect it – not to mention incarcerated artists who have gone on to formal arts training. (Marking Time itself was slated to debut at MoMA PS1 in an eponymous exhibition postponed by the pandemic.)

Published in Momus.