Aesthetics Through the Penal Hole
a Decolonizing Vision Series lecture
by Nicole R. Fleetwood
The talk will focus on art making and aesthetic practices of incarcerated people held in solitary confinement and other types of isolation units. To make art in solitary confinement is to deliberately engage the sensory deprivation that occurs in isolation cells as a mode of assault. With solitary confinement, the carceral state attempts a totalizing control over the bodies and minds of imprisoned people, largely through structuring their sensory experiences with excruciating detail and calculated indifference to their suffering. How do such restrictive mobility, sensory control, and lack of human contact impact the aesthetic experiences and practices of prisoners in solitary confinement?
Nicole Fleetwood is a professor in the Department of American Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is co-curator and contributing editor of “Prison Nation,” a special issue of Aperture magazine on the role of photography in documenting mass incarceration. She also recently completed a book on art and mass incarceration that will be released in 2019. Her two previous books are Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011) and On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015). Fleetwood is the recipient of awards and fellowships from NYPL’s Cullmen Center for Scholars and Writers, American Council of Learned Societies, Whiting Foundation, Schomburg Center for Scholars-in-Residence, and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.
Sponsored by The Institute of African American Affairs + Center for Black Visual Culture. Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Contemporary Art Research Collective; Institute of African American Affairs & Center for Black Visual Culture; and the Prison Education Program.
This event is free & open to the public. Venue is wheelchair-accessible. For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at csgsnyu@nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.