Marking Time Creativity Behind Bars
MacArthur Fellow Nicole Fleetwood ’94 uses prisoner art as a lens to encourage new approaches to justice
BY DONNA B O E N ’ 8 3 M T S C ’ 9 6 A RT P H OT OS C OU RT E S Y OF T H E A RT IS T S
24
miamian magazine
Three weeks after Nicole Fleetwood ’94 graduated from Miami University, the Hamilton, Ohio, native sat devastated in a Butler County courtroom next to her aunt and cousin, crumbling inside as she heard the judge sentence her cousin Allen to an indefinite life sentence. How was this possible? The first person in her immediate family to graduate from college — magna cum laude with an interdisciplinary studies major from Miami’s Western College program — she found herself grappling with the harsh reality that while she was heading to San Francisco to start her teaching career, Allen was heading to prison. In that moment, at age 21, she pledged to regularly write to Allen, who might as well have been her brother, they were that close. She also vowed to return to Ohio every year to see him. She kept these promises without fail and began to notice the art displayed in the visiting rooms of various Ohio prisons. Intrigued by these makeshift gallery spaces, Fleetwood started researching the artmaking and eventually interviewed more than 70 people, both currently or formerly incarcerated. She also began displaying photos around her apartment of her many relatives, neighbors, and childhood friends locked away in an attempt to deal with her own discomfort and grief. At first, she hesitated to discuss the photos. “I just didn’t know if I had the emotional capacity and the strength to actually take on a topic that felt so personal and so painful and that also involved the pain of my family,” she said. “I didn’t want my family to feel exposed, to be made more vulnerable to a level of suffering and kind of spectatorship.” However, her conversations were so cathartic for her and for those she talked with that her art collection and research evolved into a book that became an exhibition of the same name, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration. >> Locked in a Dark Calm by Tameca Cole