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Visions of Abolition: Black Women’s Fight to End Mass Incarceration

Live transcription available here.

Art historian and curator Nicole Fleetwood joined us us to discuss art production and visual advocacy by Black women to abolish prisons and to end punitive governance. Her talk expanded on her recent book and exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, which focuses on aesthetic practices and media of incarcerated artists who use penal space, penal matter, and penal time to produce art about carcerality. Discussing Black women’s centrality to the movement for prison abolition, she focused on a visual archive of US prisons researched over a decade.

Image credit: Tameca Cole, Locked in a Dark Calm, 2016

This conversation was part of the 46th annual Scholar and Feminist Conference: Art and Political Imagination, held in spring 2021.

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