We all know someone who has been affected by prisons. The United States leads the world with the highest incarceration rate of any country; over 2.2 million people, nearly 1% of the population, reside behind prison walls. Prison populations have experienced massive increases over the last 40 years, including a 500% increase as a result of law and policy changes, such as the War on Drugs of the 1980s. Minorities are far more likely to become victimized by the prison system, with Black people over 5 times more likely to be incarcerated compared to their white peers. Furthermore, studies have shown that increasing prison populations does not have any impact on increasing public safety or preventing violent crimes. Prisons cannot be separated from racism, classism, and the underlying social and economic conditions that emerge from capitalism. As put by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, prisons are “catchall solutions to social problems.”
One of the ways in which individuals are oppressed within the prison system is through penal time. Time becomes a tool used against those incarcerated. As we have seen by many well-known abolitionists such as Malcolm X and Angela Davis, penal time can also be reclaimed by those incarcerated, to transform what is used against them and give birth to something new. Where does art fit into this conversation? Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University and guest curator at MoMA PS1, compiled a series of works by artists who have been affected by the prison system. Following the release of her book, her exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration gives voice to more than 35 artists and significantly shifts the conversation surrounding penal systems.
Fleetwood’s work is not a means of glorifying prisoners, but rather a way of exposing the hidden truths of what occurs inside prison walls and the systemic injustice of the carceral system. In doing so, her work allows them to tell their stories.
Prison art, or art made in prisons, differs from other categories of art in that artists do not hold the same agency that non-prison artists do. In many cases, whether currently or formerly incarcerated, the artist does not possess or have access to their own work, which means they are unable to see the circulation of their art. They are also in many cases unable to document their works, as Fleetwood noted in her book that she had interviewed artists who could only describe their practices, without anything to show. This separation between the artists and their works imbues the latter with an additional narrative: the audience is able to see something that often, even the artist cannot.
In Fleetwood’s book, she describes many of the works as being in conversation with penal space, time, and matter. “Penal space” is defined as the prison itself, as well as the imposition of movement, disruption of family relations, and all of the dimensions upon which the prison system impedes. One of the first pieces in the exhibition is by Tameca Cole, whose collage introduces the significance of penal space throughout the exhibition. Locked in a Dark Calm (2016) was made towards the end of Cole’s sentence after being angered by a correctional officer within the facility. The collage portrays a deconstructed face in the midst of a grey cloud to highlight the artist’s frustration that persists within the harsh confinement and the entrapment she experiences in the larger prison system. There is a noticeable displacement in how her facial features fit into the rest of the work, revealing how the prison system had disrupted her identity, leaving her desperate to escape. Her experience of making the work, as for many other artists featured in the exhibit, was a way for her to cope with her displacement and the horrible conditions of her imprisonment.
Fleetwood defines “penal matter” as the material conditions of imprisonment: both what prisoners possess and what they lack. Many of the works throughout the exhibit incorporate penal matter physically, and in doing so also show what is lacking. Gilberto Rivera, a Puerto Rican artist and formerly incarcerated Bronx resident, achieves this in a mixed media collage. Constructed with prison supplies, An Institutional Nightmare is an abstract representation of prison life showing both the physical and psychological confinement of prison life. Fragmented layers of penal matter convey this confinement, down to the control of physical bodies — referenced by the prison uniform — and intellectual freedom — newspapers being the only form of access to the public. The intricate texture of the piece reveals Rivera’s desire to transform his mediums, which contrasts with the “stuckness” of the materials on the canvas, fixed onto the latter with floor wax. The use of this binding material signals the weight of captivity, as the artist references the physical architecture of prisons and the confinement of the body within the rectangular canvas frame. There is at once an immediate urge to break free and the limitation of that urge, working against each other to express the severe reality of the prison experience.
Other artists such as Sable Elyse Smith and Daniel McCarthy Clifford transform prison matter into three-dimensional shapes that take on new forms. In her sculpture Pivot I, Sable Elyse Smith takes stools from prison visiting rooms and arranges them into what resembles the star-shaped pieces of Jacks. Referencing her own experience of only being able to contact her father while sitting on these stools, Smith repurposes what is used to punish the body into something that indicates freedom and play. Similarly, Daniel McCarthy Clifford transforms hundreds of prison food trays into a large-scale sculpture as part of his research initiative the Leavenworth Project. Fleetwood notes that the trays, representative of the ritual of eating, resemble not only those in prisons, but in schools, hospitals, and asylums, forming a critique against institutionalism as a whole. Holding the trays together with metal bars and frames, the work also resembles the hard-edged aesthetic and industrial structures of modern architecture that further broaden the artist’s critique of the repression of the physical body.
What ties many of the works of the exhibition together, beyond the context in which they are made, is their relationship to penal time. Fleetwood notes that many of the artists used extremely time consuming techniques, as a way of reclaiming time when it is used as a tool to punish them. Rowan Renee’s No Spirit For Me is a prime example of this: a material manifestation of her coming to terms with her father’s death in prison. The installation consists of prints of her father’s criminal case file on a variety of materials using lithography, weaving, and metalwork. The ritualistic, time consuming, and labor intensive process of printing each file onto new mediums and hanging them one by one became what Renee described as a way of tracking the failures of the justice system, while healing from the loss of her father.
Perhaps one the most provoking pieces of the Marking Time exhibition is Jesse Krimes’ large-scale mural Apokaluptein 16389067. Made over the course of three years during the artist’s time in prison, the mural addresses the scope and longevity of penal time through form, scale, and production. The work consists of 39 prison bedsheets which Krimes transfers hundreds of photos from magazine advertisements and other print media using hair gel and toothpaste. Krimes was imprisoned in Fairton along with Gilberto Rivera and Jared Owens, another artist featured in the exhibit. Together they formed an art collective, so Krimes’ use of penal time in his work invokes similar techniques and themes addressed in Rivera’s collages. Not only was this an extremely time consuming process due to its materiality, but the artist did not see the finished piece until he was released from prison. He was only able to see each panel individually as he sent them out one by one with the help of a few prison guards. Thus, the presented work and its laborious production cannot be separated from the conditions of the artist and barriers between him and his own art. Krimes’ work speaks on behalf of all prison artists regarding the extensive forces they must hurdle in order to even engage in artmaking, a practice that in itself is a form of freedom. The finished image is a landscape with surreal, fairy tale-like figures invoking the liberation that Krimes both experiences upon his release and sees in his final piece. The title of this piece further adds to this conjunction of imagery and production; the title refers to the Greek word apokaluptein, which means to “reveal” or “uncover,” followed by the artist’s prisoner number. This “uncovering” can be understood both as a reference to the materials and to the artist’s experience of “revealing” or “uncovering” his work only upon his release.
Like Krimes and his finished mural, prison art addresses the harsh realities of mass incarceration through its content, alongside its context and production. Without the efforts of Fleetwood and those who contributed to developing the exhibit, many of these pieces would have never been shown to the public or presented in a museum setting. As put by Fleetwood in her book, “to consider art by incarcerated people as existing outside of art discourses or institutions rehearses the violent erasure of being imprisoned.” Presenting works such as these in museum settings is not only informative, but a necessary step to democratize the art industry and bring underrepresented voices into the public discourse. And as we reflect on the themes that these works address, we realize that one of the most basic freedoms, self-expression through artmaking, is not always free.
In understanding Marking Time, it is important not to see these works through a pessimistic lens. Rather, it is an opportunity to take in the perspectives of one of the most marginalized and invisible communities. In educating ourselves on the realities of the prison system, we begin to undo the generations of oppressive dialogue that originally built this system. Activists such as Fleetwood remind us of the value in pausing to listen to overlooked stories. It allows us to learn what must be undone. As Peter Biehl expresses, “sometimes it pays to shut up and listen to what other people have to say to ask: ‘Why do these terrible things happen?’ instead of simply reacting.”
See Dr. Fleetwood’s book here: https://bookshop.org/books/marking-time-art-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/9780674919228?aid=1934
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