Nicole Fleetwood has long been struck by how the prison system is portrayed visually in the mainstream media.
Images flooding television shows, documentaries and news programs display an imperfect view of the prison system and, more concerning to Fleetwood, impede efforts to reform it.
That was partly the basis for the New York University professor’s 2020 book, “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” and will be a topic of an event as part of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium.
“Abolitionist Aesthetics: The Art to End Slavery and to End Prisons” is scheduled for 4-5:30 p.m. Jan. 19, a virtual event featuring Fleetwood, the James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. The event is co-sponsored by the departments of History of Art and of Women’s and Gender Studies in LSA.
“We’re so saturated with images of incarceration and incarcerated people,” Fleetwood said in a recent Modern Art Notes podcast. “We’ve just normalized and accepted a way of seeing prisons and incarcerated people, and it makes it harder to shake up or abolish those systems because we just accept it so fundamentally as this is part of how our country functions.”
Fleetwood’s interest in the prison system stems from her family’s experiences, particularly in Ohio where family members have been incarcerated. She shared how a judge used “animalistic language” to describe an incarcerated cousin.
To help combat this type of representation, Fleetwood curated “Marking Time,” an exhibit of more than 30 incarcerated and non-incarcerated artists’ works.
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“The dehumanization and rendering as monsters Black boys, Black men, Black teenagers, it’s so deeply (ingrained in the) psychosis of this nation I feel like it’s hard to say one thing about it and I think that art is a really important way to explore it visually,” she said.
Fleetwood’s book was the culmination of a decadelong project to consider distinct visual artists, archives and strategies of abolitionist movements.
She said the mainstream media images of prisons and prisoners feel “rehearsed” and she aims to provide a more accurate view of how the nation treats wrongdoers.
“We often don’t stop to think of the meaning behind (those images) and the meaning behind a punishment system that removes people from their home, from their families, from their communities, from employment, from health care, from access to good food, from access to clean water, air and they spend their life with a status of the condemned,” she said.
“When we stop to think about that, I hope it’s unsettling.”
