On view September 16 – December 18, 2022
Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration explores the impact of the US prison system on contemporary visual art.
This exhibition highlights artists who are or have been incarcerated alongside artists who have not been incarcerated but whose practices interrogate the carceral state.
Seen together, their works reveal how punitive governance, predatory policing, surveillance, and mass imprisonment impact everyday life for many millions of people.
Art made in prisons is crucial to contemporary culture, though it has been largely excluded from established art institutions and public discourse.
Marking Time aims to shift aesthetic currents, offering new ways to envision art and to understand the reach and devastation of the US carceral state.
The artists in this exhibition reveal how incarceration transforms the fundamentals of living—time, space, and matter—and reimagine these changes to create new aesthetic possibilities.
Their artworks illuminate what curator Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood calls “carceral aesthetics,” relational and artistic experiments that challenge the “inside/outside” logic of imprisonment.
Such practices resonate with recent trends in relational art, histories of Black radical aesthetics, political art, and the creative traditions of earlier eras of captive people.
Carceral aesthetics foregrounds innovative modes of relating that refute the dehumanization, isolation, and erasure that prisons engender.
Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration is organized by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, NYU Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, with exhibition coordinator Steven G. Fullwood and the assistance of graduate researchers Anisa Jackson and Xavier Hadley.
The exhibition is presented across the Bell and Cohen Galleries at the Brown Arts Institute in collaboration with the Department of Africana Studies / Rites and Reason Theater, and will be accompanied by a dynamic series of public programs.
For information on Cohen Gallery, visit the
Brown Arts Institute’s website.
Please join us for our opening weekend programs.
All events are free and open to the public.