“Marking Time: Prison Reform and Abolition Through Art”

By Steven G Fullwood, exhibitions coordinator, Marking Time

Photo credit: John Thomas Fields.

This past summer, I was hired by Dr. Nicole Fleetwood, author of the award-winning Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, to be the exhibitions coordinator. Currently, we are finishing up a successful run at the Abrams Ingles Institute of Visual Arts (AEIVA) in Birmingham, Alabama (September 17 – December 11, 2021, which also includes programming focusing on the carceral system through art and activism. In April 2022, the exhibition will open at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati.

To learn more about Dr. Fleetwood’s book and the exhibition, follow this link to markingtimeart.com.

From the website: “Marking Time, the exhibition, features work that bear witness to artists’ experimentation with and reimagining of the fundamentals of living—time, space, and physical matter—pushing the possibilities of these basic features of daily experience to create new aesthetic visions achieved through material and formal invention. The resulting work is often laborious, time-consuming, and immersive, as incarcerated artists manage penal time through their work and experiment with the material constraints that shape art making in prison. The exhibition also includes work made by nonincarcerated artists—both artists who were formerly incarcerated and those personally impacted by the US prison system.”

For more information about Marking Time programming at AEIVA, follow this link: https://www.uab.edu/news/arts/item/12259-see-marking-time-art-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration-exhibition