Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Nicole R. Fleetwood

Abstract

Reviewed by: Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Nicole R. Fleetwood Jennifer L. Lieberman Nicole R. Fleetwood. Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2020. 352 pp. $39.95. Marking Time, a book about art and mass incarceration, is a work of art in its own right. Using a blend of interview, analysis, and autobiography, Fleetwood details how images of criminality and carcerality circulate in popular culture—and how some artists subvert those dehumanizing images with their own creations. The book's Preface begins by describing the haunting absence of men and women who disappeared from communities in the 1980s and '90s as mass incarceration expanded its reach into the author's life and across the United States. Fleetwood writes that "As prisons rendered more and more people invisible, a spectacular visual assault on residents in communities like mine helped to justify mass incarceration" in speaking of state-crafted imagery such as "wanted posters, arrest photographs, crime-scene images, and mug shots" (xvi). In contrast, she argues, families circulated "artworks and illustrations … from prison." These pieces, Fleetwood argues, were not new in and of themselves but they were many and powerful. What follows is a stunning collection of full-color images alongside their thoughtful interpretations. Fleetwood's Introduction discusses how artists assert their humanity within the dehumanizing system of the prison. She writes that "[i]ncarcerated 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 improvisation and the risks they will take to produce works and worlds that exceed the prison" (7). Of course, experimentation proves difficult in these spaces. While some artists included in Marking Time had the benefit of programs such as the Arts in Corrections workshop run by the William James Association, others, like Jared Owens, sought canvases and untraditional media only by evading surveillance and at great personal risk. In addition to cataloguing the different ways artists create within the prison, Fleetwood reflects on how these creations inflect our understanding of the world of art on the outside: "prison art shifts how we think about art collection and art collectors. The primary collectors of art made in prison are other imprisoned people and their loved ones. … 'Commission' and 'negotiation' are fraught terms to describe arrangements in which unfree artists are asked by people who hold enormous authority over their livelihood to make art in exchange for money, goods, or special treatment" (9). Fleetwood invites readers to learn a lesson about humanity and power in these pages: Even in the extreme conditions of the prison, people create. Might that in itself stand as one rationale for prison abolition? The first chapter of the book, "Carceral Aesthetics: Penal Space, Time, and Matter," builds on this implied question by discussing how "American prisons cannot be disentangled from racial capitalism" (30). In other words, assumptions about the inferiority and inherent criminality of nonwhite and specifically Black Americans is the justification for mass incarceration; the art that incarcerated people create even in these conditions contradicts the very logic of the prison. Incarcerated artists, like other creators in this tradition, create works that advocate [End Page 167] for liberation—freedom not only from the strictures of prison but from prevailing ideas about "value/worth, criminalization, and punitive governance" (31); the chapter also traces depictions of space and time, including the altered experience of time after incarceration. The pieces themselves are stunning, and Fleetwood's analyses of them perceptive: Her discussion of Raymond Towler's Salvador Dali-esque piece, Passing Time, includes melting clocks and a color scheme of "penal hues" (43). The discussion of Elizabeth Baxter's (pen name: Isis tha Saviour) series of videos, Ain't I a Woman (2018), is particularly rich and moving as it traces the intimate connections between public housing, public schools, and prisons. The art discussed here ranges from painting to video to landscape photography. Fleetwood carefully examines each piece, discussing how artists reimagine elements of their incarceration to tell narratives about healing. Chapter two, "State Goods: Clandestine Practices and Prison Art Collectives," focuses on how artists procure materials to create...