Marking Time

Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration`

Nicole R. Fleetwood

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780674250901
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte e politica

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
A Smithsonian Book of the Year
A New York Review of Books "Best of 2020" Selection
A New York Times Best Art Book of the Year
An Art Newspaper Book of the Year A 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.

1

CARCERAL AESTHETICS

PENAL SPACE, TIME, AND MATTER

IN A 2016 BBC news story titled “Inside Decaying US Prison, Former Inmates Are Guides,” Russell Craig leads a BBC journalist and film crew on a tour of the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, a defunct penitentiary turned museum in Pennsylvania. Walking the crew through the decrepit cells and along the empty corridors of the gothic structure, Craig somberly states, “You see that wall and you just know, you just know, you’re not seeing freedom for years.” Craig is speaking from personal experience. He tells the audience that before he became a tour guide at the museum, he was a prisoner at Graterford State Prison in Pennsylvania, and he describes himself as “an artist, formerly incarcerated, and now employed at Eastern State where I give tours.”

As part of the tour, he takes the documentary crew into the prison chapel, where the walls are covered in art: religious murals painted by Lester Smith, who was incarcerated at Eastern State in 1955. Craig explains that Smith was driven to make art while in prison and states that, like Smith, he too is part of a tradition of incarcerated artists. “I’m privileged to be following in that culture because I’m kind of doing the same thing.”¹ The video then shows Craig painting in his art studio, where he continues to discuss the significance of being part of a legacy of artists who emerged in prison, and how he gained a sense of identity and value by identifying as an artist while imprisoned.

His work as a tour guide at Eastern State, which was one of the world’s first penitentiaries, is newsworthy largely because of his former status as a prisoner, as the headline suggests.² But Craig turns the BBC lens to focus on another narrative: one of his identification, both individually and as part of a collective, as an imprisoned artist. He uses the word “privilege” to stake claim to a tradition of incarcerated artists, instead of focusing on the litany of negative associations the public, especially through the news media, makes about people in prison and the culture they create. Craig does this while showing the BBC crew his artwork, which he incorporates into his tours. “When I went to prison I had a mentor named James Hough, that was an excellent artist, who gave me pointers, gave me supplies, things like that. He gave me my first pastel. I didn’t even know what a pastel was. Art was like a way to distract me from the reality of being in a prison. Then eventually I started thinking, ‘Somehow I’m going to be an artist.’ It was people who was giving me discouragement, like, ‘You can’t make a living as an artist.’ … Then James, my mentor, was like, ‘If you master something, they won’t deny you. So he said, ‘Become undeniable.’ And that’s what I aim to be, undeniable.”³ The short documentary highlights the significance of Craig as a formerly incarcerated man walking through the halls of the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site and the presence of art and creativity in this site of criminalization and punishment.

Yet Craig’s assertion to be undeniable and his claiming of a legacy of culture that emerges from prisons exceed the documentary narrative and defy common assumptions about prison and the people held there. Craig uses the format of the news story to bring visibility to the presence of those rendered invisible to the broader social world, and to insist on the social and cultural value of imprisoned people. He speaks to their artistic practices, imaginary worlds, dreams, and mentoring traditions.

As part of my research for this book, I walked through the corridors of Eastern State with Craig on one of his tours. We had already known each other for two years. He had participated in programs that I had organized on art and incarceration, and I had interviewed him several times about his experiences making art in prison. Craig was excited about his new position at Eastern State and how it might serve as a vehicle to make his art more visible to a larger public. During the tour, I observed Craig, a young black man, and the visitors on his tour—all white, except for me. He began by presenting a rather expected institutional narrative of the prison—one that adheres to the information contained in guidebooks and public materials about the site. I walked behind the other tourists as we listened to him discuss the history of the penitentiary and the conditions of life for prisoners there, and watched him point to the cells that housed famous prisoners like Al Capone. After giving us the standard tour, he then shifts, as he did with BBC, to use what I call penal space—the architecture of punishment—to assert another narrative: that of the emerging artist in punitive captivity.

The juxtaposition between the built environment of the penitentiary and the art of Smith and Craig sets up a relationship between the system of locking people away as punishment and the imaginary worlds and creative practices of those held there. The artistic pursuits of the incarcerated are starkly framed against the horrors of cell blocks and locked cages. What might be less clear is how the aesthetic project of the prison serves as the institutional framework out of which Craig’s art and the works of other incarcerated artists emerge.

While incarcerated, Craig crafted styles and aesthetic practices that both arose from the very conditions of imprisonment and resisted the isolation and exclusion that prison enforces. He developed peer-mentoring relationships with other incarcerated artists. He used prison materials, like administrative documents, to make art, and he used penal time—that is, time as punishment—to cultivate a vision of himself as an artist while honing his skills and becoming what his mentor James “Yaya” Hough called being “undeniable.” Craig also developed a relationship with Mural Arts Philadelphia, a nonprofit organization that implements arts-based programming in prisons and with people directly impacted by the carceral system. After his release, Craig began working as a teaching assistant at Mural Arts Philadelphia and mentoring young people who are on parole. He, like many other incarcerated artists, transformed the limitations of prison—namely, lack of materials, spatial constraints, surveillance, and the punitive regulation of time—to create art. Moreover, his art also grapples with notions of selfhood as a young black man in relationship to perceptions of racialized criminality and the stigma of the labels “criminal,” “inmate,” and “prisoner.”

Russell Craig, State ID, 2013. Acrylic on parachute textiles, 34.75 × 54.75 inches.

State ID (2013), a painted self-portrait that Craig shows visitors on his tour, boldly asserts the status of the prisoner as artist and the artist as incarcerated person. The painting is an enlarged version of Craig’s prison ID card, an administrative identification tag that each incarcerated person is required to wear in carceral facilities. In his reimagining of the ID card, Craig performs a willful act of self-crafting as an artist, one that incorporates punitive markings, like the word “inmate,” which appears in large font. Under “inmate” is listed his criminal index number in the Pennsylvania system. His legal name appears in a lighter, smaller font. The top line reads, “PA Department of Corrections,” the bureaucratic name for the state system that governs incarceration. In it, Craig has underscored the word “art.” Craig elaborates on his discovery of art to navigate being imprisoned and labeled a criminal:

Art was like my tool, and then I found art in the prison, in the system. It says, “PA Department of Corrections”—De-part-ment—so it says “art” in the middle of “Department.” So I underlined “art,” because that word just happened to be hidden inside “Department.” That just was, you know, interesting how that was there for me. Art was my tool, my vessel, to navigate out of this system, out of that kind of lifestyle that just was going nowhere.⁴

Craig has broken apart the department of correction to locate other possibilities beyond criminalization and punitive captivity. He is not interested in state-mandated notions of rehabilitation and correction. He has found something of himself and for himself through reconstituting his criminal index as a portrait of an emerging artist.

Like many artists in prison, Craig engages in practices of carceral aesthetics, or forms of art-making that emerge as a result of the carceral state. It is a concept that I employ to examine a range of relational art practices among incarcerated people, between incarcerated people and nonincarcerated artists, and increasingly among socially engaged artists who use art to address the carceral state. The concept describes forms of art-making and cultural engagement that take place across various states of un / freedom produced in the era of mass incarceration. How art creates relational possibilities that disrupt the mandate of prison—which includes isolation, the burden of time, the disruption of family life and social relations, and one’s removal from civil society and public life—is the focus of this book. Such artistic practices radically challenge the impenetrability of prison, with its architecture, administrative systems, economies, and metaphors of locked doors, metal bars, and fortresslike walls. These artworks attempt to depict the scale and reach of incarceration and simultaneously to address what one might call a provisional public, a space of engagement facilitated through and against how prisons have shaped the public sphere and relations among people differently positioned across carceral geographies.

Carceral aesthetics is the production of art under the conditions of unfreedom; it involves the creative use of penal space, time, and matter (concepts explored later in this chapter). Immobility, invisibility, stigmatization, lack of access, and premature death govern the lives of the imprisoned and their expressive capacities. Such deprivation becomes raw material and subject matter for prison art. The creative practices of incarcerated people fundamentally challenge aesthetic traditions that link art and discernment to the free, mobile, white, Western man. Instead, carceral aesthetics often involves rendering “one’s self out of sight,” to borrow a phrase from theorist Simone Browne, or being forcibly rendered out of sight, to imagine and then clandestinely construct other worlds, ones that speak to and through captivity.⁵ It involves “fugitive planning,” and it builds on black radical thought and traditions that center the cultural production of people held in captivity, as well as on collective movements for freedom, historically and in the present.⁶

I use the term “carceral aesthetics,” instead of “anticarceral” or “abolitionist” aesthetics, to highlight the materiality, architecture, temporalities, logics, and economies of the production of prison art. One might argue that the concept of carceral aesthetics can be used to describe a wide range of art made in prison—including art by hate groups and violent representations against the very people who are subjected to incarceration, examples of which circulate widely in prisons—an argument that I do not dispute. As I curate and develop the framework, I focus on a set of practices that reveal the conditions, power, and materiality of prisons, while recognizing that artists in this book hold varying political, racial, gender, and other identifications. Though not all artists identify as abolitionists, I am interested in how carceral aesthetics can serve as practices of relationality, creativity, and discernment that 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. In this regard, carceral aesthetics builds upon prisoners’ rights movements, the black radical tradition, and other dissident cultural and political movements for freedom.

To understand the significance of the aesthetic practices of incarcerated artists, it is important to contextualize their work within overlapping Enlightenment-era projects: the birth of the prison and the public museum as institutions of governance, and the formation of a...