Visiting Experts: Nicole Fleetwood
Nicole Fleetwood will present her decade-long research and programming on art made in captivity.
Nicole Fleetwood’s book Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration explores the impact of the US prison system on contemporary visual art. The compendium exhibition highlights artists who are or have been incarcerated alongside artists who have not been incarcerated but whose practices interrogate the carceral state. Seen together, their works reveal how punitive governance, predatory policing, surveillance, and mass imprisonment impact everyday life for many millions of people. Art made in prisons is crucial to contemporary culture, though it has been largely excluded from established art institutions and public discourse. Marking Time aims to shift aesthetic currents, offering new ways to envision art and to understand the reach and devastation of the US carceral state.
Biography
Fleetwood is the Paulette Goddard Endowed Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication in the Steinhardt School at New York University, where her work focuses on Black diasporic art and visual culture, photography studies, art and public practice, performance studies, gender and feminist studies, Black cultural history, creative nonfiction, prison abolition and carceral studies, and poverty studies. She is also the author of 2015’s On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination and 2012’s Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. Her writing appears in African American Review, American Quarterly, Aperture, Artforum, Callaloo: Art and Culture in the African Diaspora, Granta, Hyperallergic, LitHub, The New York Times, Public Books, Public Culture, Signs, Social Text, art catalogues, and edited anthologies.
Fleetwood has co/curated exhibitions and public programs at MoMA PS1, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Brown University, Aperture, Cleveland Public Library, Mural Arts Philadelphia, Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, and Worth Rises, among others. She is the inaugural Genevieve Young Writing Fellow of the Gordon Parks Foundation. Her work has been supported by Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, American Council of Learned Societies, the Art for Justice Fund, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library, Whiting Foundation, Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture and Ford Foundation.
She is at work on a memoir, Between the River and Railroad Tracks, forthcoming from Little, Brown.
The upcoming open lecture is part of the Visiting Experts series where international experts in the arts and sciences share their knowledge, invited by Uniarts Helsinki’s Theatre Academy.
Nicole Fleetwood’s book Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration explores the impact of the US prison system on contemporary visual art. The compendium exhibition highlights artists who are or have been incarcerated alongside artists who have not been incarcerated but whose practices interrogate the carceral state. Seen together, their works reveal how punitive governance, predatory policing, surveillance, and mass imprisonment impact everyday life for many millions of people. Art made in prisons is crucial to contemporary culture, though it has been largely excluded from established art institutions and public discourse. Marking Time aims to shift aesthetic currents, offering new ways to envision art and to understand the reach and devastation of the US carceral state.
Biography
Fleetwood is the Paulette Goddard Endowed Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication in the Steinhardt School at New York University, where her work focuses on Black diasporic art and visual culture, photography studies, art and public practice, performance studies, gender and feminist studies, Black cultural history, creative nonfiction, prison abolition and carceral studies, and poverty studies. She is also the author of 2015’s On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination and 2012’s Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. Her writing appears in African American Review, American Quarterly, Aperture, Artforum, Callaloo: Art and Culture in the African Diaspora, Granta, Hyperallergic, LitHub, The New York Times, Public Books, Public Culture, Signs, Social Text, art catalogues, and edited anthologies.
Fleetwood has co/curated exhibitions and public programs at MoMA PS1, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Brown University, Aperture, Cleveland Public Library, Mural Arts Philadelphia, Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, and Worth Rises, among others. She is the inaugural Genevieve Young Writing Fellow of the Gordon Parks Foundation. Her work has been supported by Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, American Council of Learned Societies, the Art for Justice Fund, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library, Whiting Foundation, Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture and Ford Foundation.
She is at work on a memoir, Between the River and Railroad Tracks, forthcoming from Little, Brown.
The upcoming open lecture is part of the Visiting Experts series where international experts in the arts and sciences share their knowledge, invited by Uniarts Helsinki’s Theatre Academy.