Interview by Erica Commisso
April 20 marked the release of Nicole Fleetwood’s book, Marking Time (Harvard University Press), the result of a years-long look at art produced in the confines of incarceration. Fleetwood, the director of the Institute for Research on Women and an associate professor of American Studies at Rutgers University, provides cultural, historical, and political context for mass incarceration; the various ways art is used and produced in the prison system; and the myriad interpretations an artist or viewer can have when encountering the vast creativity found in a system that perpetuates racism, isolation, and punishment. In the prison system, she finds stories of beauty and hope from artists as they fight against the forces that seek to oppress them.
Content Warning: This interview contains short descriptions of anti-Black racism and violence.
Erica Commisso: Can you tell me about your experience at Rutgers? What are your methods of teaching and researching?
Nicole Fleetwood: Even in graduate school, I was very interested in the intersection of visual culture, broadly, and cultural anthropology, so I often use methods that anthropologists use. I like to do interviews and the like. I also use social cultural theory, really using the different disciplines and the methods of those disciplines to interrogate race and how we perceive race, how we experience race, how our visual aids and the way we see the world and interact with the world is part of racialization. And not just thinking about it in terms of the social and political dimensions of it, but also thinking about the psychic and interior dimensions of it, in terms of how we experience our own embodiment and our own subjectivity––our options and choices and dreams and horizons. I’m really interested in the relationship between that interior world and the exterior world.
EC: How does that develop into Marking Time and your study of the criminal justice system?
NF: So much of what inspired me to do Marking Time, which is a study of visual culture and art in an era of mass incarceration, was my family’s experience with imprisonment––visiting my cousins in prison; visiting relatives … I was also just looking around these visiting rooms. In many prisons you’ll see craft objects and paintings and sculptures made by incarcerated people. So I just started thinking more and more about that creative world.
EC: Are there one or more art pieces that you discuss in the book that stick out in your mind? What makes them so powerful in your brain?
NF: I am really inspired and moved by all the work in the book for various reasons, so I don’t want to just pull out one or two, but I will say that the chapter on solitary confinement was a chapter that I didn’t realize I was writing. It’s looking at art made in solitary confinement, where people have less access to material goods, and they’re often dealing with the severe physical and psychological tolls of isolation. Art-making becomes a really fundamental strategy of survival. For many of the artists I interviewed who were in solitary confinement, it was the thing that kept them from going insane or from self-harming, or kept them connected to a larger public. That chapter, for me, is really important and meaningful.
And then, early on, there’s a drawing by Tameca Cole called Locked in a Dark Calm. People who’ve seen it have been really moved by it because it’s really simple and elegant and just says so much about the power of creativity, but also the psychic, material, and physical wake of prisons on people. It’s a collage that she made, in part, in response to being subjected to abuse from prison guards. She said there was nothing she really could do to protect herself, or speak out without getting punished for it. So she created this collage as a way of creating the safety that she wanted to experience.
EC: I was struck by the fact that the original Marking Time conference happened in 2014, and the book came out in 2020. Both are pivotal times for Americans in terms of viewing race, with Eric Garner’s death in 2014 and George Floyd’s murder a few weeks after publication of the book. I think it’s tragic that there’s a recent example, in both cases, of how the police and justice system as a whole view race.
NF: People who make art in prison identify with people like Garner and Floyd, who have been victims of anti-Black violence and the criminalization of Black people––which often leads to these really horrifying engagements with the police that Black people do not want but can’t refuse. Eric Garner begs the officers to leave him alone––saying “you all are always harassing me,” before he even gets to “I can’t breathe,” before he’s even being strangled––he asks them to leave him alone. It’s these forced-upon relationships that Black people have with the punitive state, inside and outside of prison. So many of the artists I talked to have done portraits and works that memorialize people like Eric Garner. Recently some have done portraits that memorialize George Floyd, and show how he was not only terrorized but brutally murdered. I also think about how we as a broader public––not to say that there’s just one public––have been traumatized by watching that nine-minute video, but also how to act on it. Not doing anything is being compliant with a system that is literally meant to produce the death of Black people that are vulnerable.
EC: You mention in your book the notion of Kantian racial hierarchy that places Black people below European white people. Do you think we’ve evolved from that?
NF: I think it’s important to ask: who is the “we” in that? Black people are aware of the value of our lives and our beings, right? Who is the “we”?
[ … ]
In the governmentality of North America and Western Europe, in the Coronavirus pandemic––especially in the United States and in England––because of all kinds of inequality and the deep devaluation of the lives of People of Colour, the US government has this assessment of the heavy burden and toll that Corona is taking. Especially on young Black people in the United States. A professor at Princeton, quotes that 1 in 2000 Black people have died from Corona [across the United States], which is an unbelievable number. During a time of crisis, what types of populations get insulated from that crisis? And what populations are just decimated?
EC: You speak a lot in the book about the historical context of racialization in politics.
NF: I give a lot of historical and political context but, for me, at the centre of it is aesthetic art and ways of forging relationships. I think this book offers really important strategies to think about organizing and creating adversary moments … At the centre of the book is how you forge relationships; how you create under some of the most brutal, austere, authoritarian conditions.
EC: Do you think the ways that people are creating art are being forced to change because of Covid-19?
NF: Incarcerated people are being punished even more harshly because of the pandemic. In many facilities, they are on lockdown. They’re locked in their cells all day. That kind of lockdown is equivalent to punitive isolation. The state is using these punitive structures to manage this out-of-control health crisis.
A couple of the artists in the book who have done panels and interviews around the book say you can’t socially distance in a cell. Prisons aren’t places where people have access to hand-washing, to PPE, [and] they have very little control over their mobility or where they’re housed. So the whole way that we have been told––as non-incarcerated private citizens––to manage this, are basic practices that are not available to people who are held in prison. The places where we have received numbers, those numbers are astronomically high. The numbers are out of control, so much so that a lot of Departments of Correction state-wide are refusing to take a count of it, because they don’t want the responsibility of someone actually, actively exhibiting signs. They’d rather just ignore it.
EC: How are you preparing for the exhibition at PS1 that was supposed to happen in April?
NF: I am now curating an exhibition called Marking Time based on the book, but it also expands beyond the book, so there are several artists who are in the exhibition who are not in the book. For me, it’s a way of growing the book. With the book, there’s an end date. This was a way of extending the book, without the due date, into physical and/or digital space.
The show was supposed to open on April 5 and, as the world knows, not much happened on April 5. We’re all dealing with the pandemic, and the show was indefinitely postponed. And it is our hope that we will be able to open the show in the fall. PS1 hasn’t confirmed a date yet because the museum is doing its due diligence about how to safely re-open and also following the cues of the city of New York. What I can say for sure is that the show will happen, and I think the relevance of the material of the show will, hopefully, resonate even more because of the overlapping crises we’re in, with the health crisis and the anti-Black sanction campaign. I’m inspired by the many millions of people across the world who have weathered both of these crises to come together in protest to say no more killing of Black people, and [protest] the largest structures of racial oppression, inequality, [and] dehumanization that have been foundational to Western democracy.
EC: I saw that you spent time in Houston, where George Floyd is being laid to rest. When he was murdered, did you think back to your time in Houston? How did that affect you professionally and personally?
NF: I spent a year and a half in Houston. My mom relocated when I was in high school, and my mom, my brother, and my step-family are there. I go back to Houston a couple of times a year. George Floyd was very involved in the hip hop community in Houston; Houston has a really robust music scene, and George Floyd was a part of that. My brother was also really involved, as a really huge hip hop fan. He actually met George Floyd on a couple of occasions. For me, no death from the state that falls on a Black life is abstract, but this is closer to home in many ways. It’s also been really beautiful to watch and see the way he’s being memorialized by the people who really knew him. I think as we honour him and fight against all the forces that killed him, it’s also important to look at him as a person who has a daughter, and all these people who loved him.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Nicole R. Fleetwood is Professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University. Her work on art and mass incarceration has been featured at the Aperture Foundation, the Zimmerli Museum of Art, the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, and the Cleveland Public Library, and her exhibitions have been praised by The Nation, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Village Voice. She is the author of On Racial Icons and of Troubling Vision, which won the Lora Romero Prize from the American Studies Association.
Erica Commisso is a Toronto-based writer with a lot of writing experience in both New York City, where she lived and attended NYU’s graduate journalism school, and Toronto, where she’s done everything from freelancing to writing for a radio station website. She has interviewed musicians, hockey players, fashion designers, and many other eclectic personalities. Her work can be found in MANHATTAN Magazine, Rolling Stone, Bleu Magazine, and Deadspin, among other places.