{"id":15953,"date":"2021-10-14T13:50:16","date_gmt":"2021-10-14T13:50:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=15953"},"modified":"2022-06-16T21:22:16","modified_gmt":"2022-06-16T21:22:16","slug":"with-each-other","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=15953","title":{"rendered":"With Each Other"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h4 class=\"has-cyan-bluish-gray-color has-text-color wp-block-heading\">From&nbsp;<em>Art Journal<\/em>&nbsp;80, no. 3 (Fall 2021)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Nicole R. Fleetwood.&nbsp;<em>Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration<\/em><\/strong>. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. 352 pp.; 95 color ills. $39.95<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong><em>Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration<\/em><\/strong>. Exhibition organized by Nicole R. Fleetwood. MoMA PS1, Queens, New York, September 17, 2020\u2013April 5, 2021<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Marking Time<\/em>&nbsp;is the shared title of a recent National Book Critics Circle Award\u2013winning publication and an exhibition about prison art. Together, the two offer an extended, innovative model for thinking about the visual culture of mass incarceration and the creative practices of incarcerated artists as well as those who have been touched by the carceral state. From the outset, this approach unsettles the ground upon which more familiar modes of art criticism unfold.<sup>1<\/sup>&nbsp;To talk about one\u2019s approach is to talk about one\u2019s style of intellectual engagement and the social-historical context from which it emerges. There is, of course, no&nbsp;<em>one<\/em>&nbsp;way of being an art critic these days. And while the book does not intervene in debates between detached observers and those of us more attuned to our relations with art,&nbsp;<em>Marking Time<\/em>&nbsp;forces all of us to interrogate the notions of freedom, access, and mobility that are foundational to established modes of art criticism, grounded in the idealized image of the self-possessed, discerning critic who gets to determine their relation to their object of study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The aim of Nicole R. Fleetwood\u2019s project is twofold: she seeks to foreground prison art as central to the contemporary art world and to demonstrate how it emerges as both a manifestation and a critique of the carceral state. She draws on scholarship from Black studies, visual culture studies, and the burgeoning field of critical prison studies to develop a conceptual language for addressing a range of creative practices that arise from conditions of unfreedom. Her approach is deeply informed by a tradition that finds an earlier emanation in the pages of the 1831 slave narrative&nbsp;<em>The History of Mary Prince<\/em>: \u201c\u2018To be free is very sweet,\u2019 I said.\u201d<sup>2<\/sup>&nbsp;Prince articulates a knowledge of freedom that, according to Fred Moten, \u201cis highly mediated by deprivation and by mediation itself, and by a vast range of other actions directed toward the eradication of deprivation.\u201d<sup>3<\/sup>&nbsp;The creative practices that Fleetwood addresses in the book bear this knowledge of freedom and are directed toward the dissolution of the punitive captivity that is its condition of emergence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"985\" height=\"1000\" src=\"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/NFleetwoodArtintheAgeofMassIncarceration.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-15955\" srcset=\"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/NFleetwoodArtintheAgeofMassIncarceration.jpeg 985w, https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/NFleetwoodArtintheAgeofMassIncarceration-493x500.jpeg 493w, https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/NFleetwoodArtintheAgeofMassIncarceration-197x200.jpeg 197w, https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/NFleetwoodArtintheAgeofMassIncarceration-720x731.jpeg 720w, https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/NFleetwoodArtintheAgeofMassIncarceration-560x569.jpeg 560w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 985px) 100vw, 985px\" \/><figcaption><br><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Fleetwood\u2019s central claim is that \u201cprison art is not simply influenced by but is&nbsp;<em>part of<\/em>&nbsp;the black radical tradition\u201d (31, emphasis in original). This explains why we hear an echo of Cedric Robinson\u2019s famous assertion that \u201cblack radicalism is a negation of Western civilization\u201d in Fleetwood\u2019s conceptualization of \u201ccarceral aesthetics,\u201d which frames prison art as a set of creative practices \u201cthat do not aim to reproduce or preserve prisons, but to visualize the end of human captivity, devaluation, dispossession, and the carceral logics that tether bodies to penal systems\u201d (26). Rather than serving as a call for the recognition or valorization of \u201cprison art\u201d as a categorical description or for its incorporation into the scholarly lexicon of art history,&nbsp;<em>Marking Time<\/em>&nbsp;is driven by a broader intervention most starkly conveyed in Fleetwood\u2019s argument that \u201ccarceral aesthetics, as relational practices,&nbsp;<em>repositions<\/em>&nbsp;the viewing and discerning subject away from Western racial hierarchies to create affective possibilities of belonging, collectivity, and subjecthood from positions of unfreedom\u201d (31, emphasis added). This \u201crepositioning\u201d implies a reordering of the visual field, a reconstruction of the very grounds of aesthetic discernment, and a reconception of the practice of art criticism\u2014which is to say, more generally, what it means to think with and among other persons and things. This key aspect of carceral aesthetics cannot be confused with the postmodernist trope of \u201cdecentering of the subject,\u201d which merely evacuated difference in the service of reproducing the universalizing discourse that this seemingly radical gesture sought to renounce. Rather, repositioning entails something like seeing the white cube not as a timeless space or an ideological construct but as what it is: a node embedded in an expansive landscape shaped by punitive captivity, racial violence, and the mass removal of millions of people from public life.<sup>4<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Marking Time<\/em>&nbsp;examines artworks and creative experiments by incarcerated artists as well as their collaborative projects with nonincarcerated artists, who use their craft to explore the carceral state\u2019s expansive reach beyond prison walls. The book opens with a preface and a note on method that underline the Black feminist conception of relationality at the heart of Fleetwood\u2019s project.<sup>5<\/sup>&nbsp;The practices of care, regard, and mutual support through which Black women continue to sustain intimate and social bonds under the terror and duress of mass incarceration provide Fleetwood with a blueprint for navigating the numerous institutional, logistical, and physical barriers that limit access to incarcerated artists and relegate incarcerated people outside of the view of the public. \u201cThis power to reveal and hide prisons and the imprisoned,\u201d Fleetwood writes, \u201chas an enormous influence on how the larger public comes to understand the function of the prison and to justify the removal and incapacitation of millions\u201d (15). Confronted with the carceral state\u2019s control of the field of vision (i.e., \u201ccarceral visuality,\u201d 87), Fleetwood relied on networks of currently and formerly incarcerated artists, activists, educators, attorneys, and family members to access the art she studies. From the outset, this approach to prison art as a fundamentally collaborative endeavor runs in conflict with the image of the art critic as a free, singular being unencumbered by the material conditions of thought. What accompanies and animates the many contributions&nbsp;<em>Marking Time<\/em>&nbsp;makes to art history, Black studies, and visual studies is an intellectual style that proceeds by way of thinking with others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Each chapter explores different genres, forms, and practices of art making that emerge from imprisonment while explicating the historical, political, economic, cultural, social, and psychic dimensions of punitive captivity that incarcerated artists bring into view. Fleetwood\u2019s illuminating analysis of Ronnie Goodman\u2019s 2008 self-portrait&nbsp;<em>San Quentin Arts in Corrections Art Studio<\/em>&nbsp;in the introduction to the book effectively demonstrates her sophisticated engagement with the material, compositional, and formal dimensions of works of art, then moves on to considerations of the carceral logics that justify the warehousing of people in prisons, severing of intimate and familial bonds, ongoing decimation of communities, and stigmatizing of entire lifeworlds. For Fleetwood, Goodman\u2019s depiction of a solitary figure looking at a print while standing in a large workspace is an \u201cact of self-invention in which Goodman inserts himself into a studio art tradition\u201d (1). The high ceiling and open floor plan, along with the portraits, prints, and landscape paintings displayed on the wall in the immediate background, depict \u201can idyllic scene for the creation of art\u201d that stands in stark contrast to the small cells in which Goodman and other incarcerated people are confined (1). Similarly, the fine details of Todd (Hyung-Rae) Tarselli\u2019s realist portrayal of a chipmunk painted on a maple leaf reflects incarcerated artists\u2019 limited access to art materials and serves as a testament to his dedicated practice of painting and drawing nature scenes during his years in solitary confinement. Through this and other forms of prison art we gain access, if only speculatively, to the creative experiments and practices of living forged amid the quotidian violence of the carceral system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In chapter 1, Fleetwood develops her concept of carceral aesthetics as \u201cthe production of art under the conditions of unfreedom\u201d and introduces the related concepts of penal space, time, and matter (25). Turning to the work of theorists like Kandice Chuh, David Lloyd, Jacques Ranci\u00e8re, and Fred Moten, Fleetwood draws attention to how associations of aesthetics, freedom, and subjecthood in Western thought are at the foundation of the racializing discourse and systems of classification that legitimate state power and empire. From the perspective of the regulative discourse on the aesthetic formulated by Immanuel Kant, the incarcerated artist is categorically impossible. \u201cFor Kant,\u201d as Fleetwood explains, \u201cthe mobile and discerning observer, the man of freedom, is the progenitor of aesthetic discernment and valuation\u201d (29). Russell Craig\u2019s 2013 painting&nbsp;<em>State ID<\/em>&nbsp;featured in this chapter poses a direct challenge to Kant\u2019s policing of creative capacities, as this enlarged version of his prison ID \u201creconstitut[es] his criminal index as a portrait of an emerging artist\u201d (25). Craig\u2019s appropriation of his ID as a technology of surveillance and an assertion of a creative capacity that emerges out of a state of punitive captivity not only moves against philosophical discourses on aesthetics foundational to Western thought but also repositions the viewing\/discerning subject that those discourses imagine within the \u201ccarceral geographies\u201d\u2014to borrow a term from one of Fleetwood\u2019s main interlocutors, Ruth Wilson Gilmore\u2014that leave no corner of the United States untouched.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Chapter 2 reads as robust engagement with the third term in Fleetwood\u2019s triangulation of penal space, time, and matter. Penal space refers to the myriad ways prisons regulate contact and intimacy, within as well as beyond the built environment, while penal time \u201cencompasses the multiple temporalities that impact the lives of the incarcerated and their loved ones\u201d (39). Penal matter at once encapsulates (1) the material infrastructures of the penal system, (2) the regulation of the incarcerated artist\u2019s access to material and supplies, and (3) the body in punitive captivity. In addition to the use of found objects and ephemera, the chapter details how artists acquire and repurpose state goods as part of their art-making process despite the personal risk of being charged with a disciplinary infraction. Fleetwood takes up the language of \u201cmushfake\u201d and \u201cprocurement\u201d to describe how artists like Dean Gillispie and Daniel McCarthy Clifford transform penal matter into art. \u201cMushfake,\u201d Fleetwood explains, \u201cis a type of bricolage in which imprisoned artists reinvent penal matter to create possibilities and experiences connected to their lives outside prison\u201d (64). Gillispie\u2019s mini replicas of a diner and a 1960s Airstream camper are constructed from refashioned discarded objects and items usually found in commissaries, such as soda cans, backs of notebooks, and foil wrappers from cigarette packs. His intricate details often gesture to an elsewhere, like the handwritten sign on the door of the camper that reads \u201cClosed\/Gone fishing,\u201d which Fleetwood aptly reads as \u201cgesturing to life off the grid, leisure, and an unboundedness unavailable to those held in punitive captivity\u201d (68). Clifford\u2019s&nbsp;<em>One Ton Je\u017eek<\/em>&nbsp;(2018), a large \u201canti-monument\u201d that rests on an angle like a toy jack, highlights the entanglements between militarism and the prison industrial complex, as the food trays stacked inside the sculpture\u2019s large metal frame originate from two facilities that imprisoned political activists and dissenters in World War I. The latter half of the chapter demonstrates how the repurposing of state goods for art making oftentimes depends on and facilitates relationships between the incarcerated. Here, Fleetwood turns to the multiracial Fairton Collective, consisting of Gilberto Rivera, Jesse Krimes, and Jared Owens, as an example, describing the shared interest in conceptual art and abstract painting that they cultivated among themselves. This investment in each other\u2019s artistic development not only is reflected in some of the themes, techniques, and repurposed materials that appear across their works but also is central to how Rivera came to understand his frequent, punitive transfers coordinated by prison authorities as opportunities to access supplies and acquire new art skills. Together, these stories of appropriating, repurposing, and refashioning one\u2019s own status as state goods complicate the prevailing narrative of found objects and ephemera in contemporary art. The unrealized creativity usually attributed to raw materials awaiting the genius of artists is impossible to distinguish from the creative capacities of incarcerated artists, which are devalued as \u201clawless\u201d and, as such, never waiting to be found.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/rcaj_a_1960087_uf0001_c.jpeg\" alt=\"A neon light artwork on a wall.\nSable Elyse Smith, Landscape V, 2020, neon, 80\u2009\u00d7\u2009198\u2009\u00d7\u20098 in. (203.2\u2009\u00d7\u2009502.9\u2009\u00d7\u200920.3\u2009cm), installation view, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, MoMA PS1, New York, 2020\u201321 (photograph by Kris Graves, provided by MoMA PS1)\" class=\"wp-image-15957\" width=\"670\" height=\"505\" srcset=\"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/rcaj_a_1960087_uf0001_c.jpeg 500w, https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/rcaj_a_1960087_uf0001_c-200x151.jpeg 200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 670px) 100vw, 670px\" \/><figcaption><strong>Sable Elyse Smith, <em>Landscape V<\/em>, 2020<\/strong>, neon, 80\u2009\u00d7\u2009198\u2009\u00d7\u20098 in. (203.2\u2009\u00d7\u2009502.9\u2009\u00d7\u200920.3\u2009cm), installation view, <em>Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration<\/em>, MoMA PS1, New York, 2020\u201321 (photograph by Kris Graves, provided by MoMA PS1)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"> <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Chapters 3 and 4 focus on two prevalent visual forms in prisons: photography and portraiture. Noting photography\u2019s extensive career as a technology of surveillance and tool of state power, Fleetwood offers examples of photo studies that attempt to counteract the criminal index represented by mug shots and prison ID cards. Projects such as Sara Bennett\u2019s&nbsp;<em>Life After Life in Prison: The Bedroom Project<\/em>&nbsp;(2017\u201319), which consists of photographs of women\u2019s bedrooms after their release from prison, and Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick\u2019s collaborations, focusing on those affected by the penal system in Louisiana, work in traditions of documentary photography to capture the diffuse reach of the carceral state. Fleetwood also notes how imprisonment shapes the constant negotiation between the photographed subject and the photographer interested in documenting their captivity or the continued effects of incarceration. In light of the few examples of photography programs in prisons that depart from rehabilitative models, Fleetwood\u2019s earlier discussion of Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter\u2019s video triptych&nbsp;<em>Ain\u2019t I a Woman<\/em>&nbsp;(2018) represents the possibilities of experimental video art. The piece shifts between a restaging of the artist\u2019s giving birth in captivity to images of public schools and neighborhoods where she once lived, with lyrical overlays that evoke the Middle Passage, linking the memory of slavery to mass incarceration and what Fleetwood terms as the \u201cafterlives of captivity,\u201d in which many remain tethered by carceral governance and under the stigma of criminality (39).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Alternatively, portraiture, as Fleetwood explains, \u201ccounterpose[s] against the large state archive of mug shots and criminal indexes\u201d (124). One of the most common forms of art making inside prisons, portraiture exists as an entry point for aspiring incarcerated artists, a form of currency, and a way of visualizing kinship and intimate bonds disrupted by the carceral state. Mark Loughney\u2019s&nbsp;<em>Pyrrhic Defeat: A Visual Study of Mass Incarceration<\/em>&nbsp;(2014\u2013present) serially deploys the genre\u2019s venerating effects with his drawings of the hundreds of people housed with him in a Pennsylvania prison facility. This ongoing project conveys the burgeoning numbers of people locked away in prisons and responds to how prisons deeply shape the visual field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I lifted the title of this review from the second line of A. B. Spellman\u2019s \u201cWhen Black People Are,\u201d featured in the 1971 anthology&nbsp;<em>The Black Poets<\/em>, edited by the famed Dudley Randall. When they appear on the other side of the break that opens the poem\u2014\u201cwhen black people are\/with each other\u201d\u2014the three words convey a relational mode that is untethered to any particular subject. This mode returns at the poem\u2019s end, which describes a collective survival in which \u201cstrength flows\/back &amp; forth between us like\/borrowed breath.\u201d<sup>6<\/sup>&nbsp;It is difficult to square the interdependency and conspiratorial quality of that \u201cborrowed breath\u201d with Spellman\u2019s letter to the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) ten years later as the director of the National Endowment for the Arts\u2019s expansion program, which Fleetwood quotes in chapter 5. Rejecting the coalition\u2019s request for the continued funding of BECC\u2019s Prison Arts Program, a regretful Spellman cites the shifts in funding policies under the Reagan administration with a sentiment that conveys the complex power structures, dynamics, and \u201cfraught imaginaries\u201d that prison arts programs and collaborations between incarcerated and nonincarcerated artists have been forced to maneuver (158). Fleetwood\u2019s discussion of political prisoner Ojore Lutalo\u2019s art-making practice in solitary confinement in chapter 6 speaks to the afterlife of Spellman\u2019s earlier radical vision of Black solidarity. These mostly black-and-white collages, which the artist describes as \u201cvisual propaganda\u201d in allusion to Emory Douglas\u2019s political aesthetics, record the isolation, sensory deprivation, and disorientation that he endured while segregated from the general prison population for the infraction of allegedly promoting radical political ideas. Consisting of cuttings from newspapers and legal documents, these collages were at times correspondences with nonincarcerated people and constructed a \u201cprovisional public\u201d advocating for his release across carceral geographies (25, 214)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the final chapter of the book, Fleetwood offers parts of her own experience of visiting family members in prison as an autobiographical example of the power of vernacular prison portraits to visualize attachments between the incarcerated and their nonincarcerated loved ones across time and space. In addition to the distinctive backdrops of these portraits, which both signal and conceal the carceral setting, the photographs\u2019 composition, circulation, and haptic qualities enable practices of belonging, rendering them into complex artifacts that mark the different ways those inside and outside prison experience the passage of time. Through her story, Fleetwood offers an instructive account of the \u201cevent of photography,\u201d with descriptions of how the staging of a photo shoot creates a site where posers can potentially find small, intimate moments of contact while following a photographer\u2019s direction.<sup>7<\/sup>&nbsp;Under conditions of unfreedom, the touch of the photograph, the touch that photography enables across penal time, space, and matter, radically pronounces an affectively charged domain where the intimate ties severed by the carceral state intermingle and congeal into emblems from another world, where prisons have ceased to exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The book ends where the MoMA PS1 exhibition begins\u2014with the thought-provoking work of interdisciplinary artist and writer Sable Elyse Smith. Fleetwood\u2019s conclusion focuses on the ways Smith, who has spent much of her life visiting her father in prison, uses her art to \u201chighligh[t] both the disruption that prison causes for black family life and social identity, and the intimacies of gendered and sexual formation in the diaphanous and highly regulated lenses of carceral visuality\u201d (257). Affixed to one of the white brick walls in the foyer of the MoMA PS1 main building, Smith\u2019s&nbsp;<em>Landscape V<\/em>&nbsp;(2020) was the first piece that visitors encountered. The title of this neon-text work alludes to the Western tradition of landscape paintings while at the same time recalling the prison visiting rooms where paintings of dreamlike vistas serve as the backdrops against which the incarcerated pose for photographs with family and friends. From the outset of the exhibition, the repositioning that Fleetwood theorizes in her text was already underway, as Smith marked the convergence of these two white cubes\u2014the prison visiting room and the exhibition space\u2014with neon-lighting tubes bent and arranged to spell out a poetic vision of abolition that plays on the level of the senses:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\">\nSomeone smashed the policeman\u2019s radio<br>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\">\nAnd finally silence A black language infinitely<br>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\">\nAnd blue in a decade where it finally means sky<br><br>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Smith attunes the viewer to what the sound of the police, as carceral visuality\u2019s corollary and accompaniment, seeks to drown out: a knowledge highly mediated by the conditions of unfreedom from which it emerges. To embrace this knowledge is to realize that one is embedded within a landscape shaped by punitive captivity, racial violence, and the mass extraction of millions. It is this repositioning that animates Fleetwood\u2019s book, her curatorial sensibility, and her intellectual style. Her project invites viewers of prison art to follow the approach of the visitor, a style of thinking and being known well by those of us familiar with the touch of carcerality.<sup>8<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Ultimately, this last note is one of gratitude. I have never written about prisons or shaken the intellectual isolation engendered by the particular stigma I am describing as the touch of carcerality. The gift Fleetwood gives is the acknowledgment that many of us visitors\u2014those of us who know the number five as a shibboleth\u2014are already here, with each other. I have to also thank Devon Wade, Amanda Alexander, and Julia Mendoza, along with my students and friends who have taught me what it means to be a visitor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Nijah Cunningham <\/strong>is an assistant professor of English at Hunter College, CUNY. His teaching and research focus on African American and African diaspora literatures and culture. His writing has appeared in platforms such as&nbsp;<em>Small Axe<\/em>, the&nbsp;<em>New Inquiry<\/em>,&nbsp;<em>ASAP\/J<\/em>, and&nbsp;<em>PMLA<\/em>, and he has a forthcoming catalog essay for Samuel Levi Jones and a book project titled \u201cQuiet Dawn.\u201d He is the curator of&nbsp;<em>Hold: A Meditation on Black Aesthetics<\/em>&nbsp;(Princeton University Art Museum, 2017\u201318) and, alongside David Scott and Erica Moiah James, cocurator of&nbsp;<em>Caribbean Queer Visualities<\/em>&nbsp;(Small Axe Project, 2016) and&nbsp;<em>The Visual Life of Social Affliction<\/em>&nbsp;(Small Axe Project, 2019\u201320).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\"><li> For Nicole R. Fleetwood\u2019s brilliant reflections on the question of approach, see \u201c<em>Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration<\/em>&nbsp;Book Launch,\u201d featuring Fleetwood, Fred Moten, Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, and Jesse Krimes, MoMA PS1, April 28, 2020, Vimeo video,&nbsp;<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/416021133\" target=\"_blank\">https:\/\/vimeo.com\/416021133<\/a>.<\/li><li>Mary Prince,&nbsp;<em>The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, with a Supplement by the Editor<\/em>&nbsp;(1831), reprinted in&nbsp;<em>The Classic Slave Narratives<\/em>, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1987), 208.<\/li><li>Fred Moten, \u201cKnowledge of Freedom,\u201d&nbsp;<em>CR: The New Centennial Review<\/em>&nbsp;4, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 303.<\/li><li>This assertion is my attempt to at least gesture toward some of the burning questions that&nbsp;<em>Marking Time<\/em>&nbsp;has engendered in me as a reader. And while it may go beyond the scope of a book review, one of these questions should at the very least be put in the air: Is the contemporary art world\u2014as well as art criticism and art history\u2014capable, ready, or willing to approach prison art?<\/li><li> In her thoughtful review of&nbsp;<em>Marking Time<\/em>, Jackie Wang rightfully states, \u201cIt is important to remember that the seeds of the police and prison abolitionist movement were planted long ago, as far back as the struggle to end slavery. In recent decades, Black women have tended these seeds by developing the conceptual framework for the movement (think Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba) and by performing the care labor of holding together communities that have been convulsed by mass incarceration.\u201d Fleetwood\u2019s work is an extension of this ongoing struggle for Black freedom from plantation slavery to the contemporary carceral state. See Wang, \u201cCarceral Aesthetics: The Conditions of Making Art in Prison,\u201d&nbsp;<em>Art in America<\/em>, June 18, 2020,&nbsp;<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/aia-reviews\/marking-time-art-age-mass-incarceration-nicole-r-fleetwood-prison-1202691575\/\" target=\"_blank\">https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/aia-reviews\/marking-time-art-age-mass-incarceration-nicole-r-fleetwood-prison-1202691575\/<\/a>.<\/li><li>A. B. Spellman, \u201cWhen Black People Are,\u201d in <em>The Black Poets: A New Anthology<\/em>, ed. Dudley Randall (New York: Bantam Press, 1971).<\/li><li>See Ariella Azoulay,<em> Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography<\/em> (London: Verso Books, 2012).<\/li><li>See United States v. Casas, 356 F.3d 104 (1st. Cir. 2004), US App. LEXIS 763 (2004). Citing my father\u2019s case poses a profound epistemological challenge that I cannot begin to unravel here.<\/li><\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nijah Cunningham reviews Nicole R. Fleetwood&#8217;s <em>Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":15955,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1619,1621],"class_list":["post-15953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-art-journal","tag-black-studies","tag-carceral-aesthetics",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15953"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15953\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}