Featured in What an Abolitionist Exhibition Looks Like in a Carceral World
At MoMA PS1, New York, Nicole R. Fleetwood curates a show that considers the artistic output of those irrevocably shaped by the conditions of the prison industrial complex
‘Mass incarceration’, a phrase that has gained much purchase in the last two decades, features prominently in the title of ‘Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration’, an exhibition at New York’s MoMA PS1 and a book published by Harvard University Press. Both are the culmination of more than ten years of effort by Nicole R. Fleetwood, Professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University. Describing a phenomenon that began in the late 1960s – in which the prisons system ballooned exponentially – the term ‘mass incarceration’ is sometimes poorly interpreted, taken to mean that the problem is only one of scale or degree, not of kind. Today, many are convinced that there are too many