Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Product Description

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle AwardA Smithsonian Book of the YearA New York Review of Books “Best of 2020” SelectionA New York Times Best Art Book of the YearAn Art Newspaper Book of the YearA 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.

Review

“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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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Jessica Lynne
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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.”
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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