Prison Journalism Project > tab: Stories
- Prison Journalism Project > tab: StoriesSection: Poems provides "poetry, songs and spoken word pieces depicting the realities, culture and emotions of incarcerated life. "Section: Art & Illustrations highlights "art, illustrations, photos, cartoons and other visually oriented stories created by incarcerated artists."
Current Exhibition
- Angela Davis - Seize the TimeExhibition: Through June 11, 2023. "Angela Davis — Seize the Time, examines the image, influence, and activism of the Oakland-based icon." According to writer Navya Pothamsetty, this exhibition includes a section covering "mass incarceration and Davis’s work on prison abolition."
Location: Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak Street, Oakland, CA.
Past Exhibitions & Related Material
- I Tried to Save Myself: Work from Representatives of Recess AssemblyExhibition: Oct. 28 - Dec. 1, 2022. "Recess Assembly youth fellows and program educators present a selection of work confronting ideas of identity, the body, and radical beauty, tied together by the thread of fraternity and community."
Location: The Gallatin Galleries, 1 Washington Pl @ Broadway, New York, NY. - Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass IncarcerationExhibition: Sept. 16 - Dec. 18, 2022. Organized by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, NYU Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, with exhibition coordinator Steven G. Fullwood and assistance of graduate researchers Anisa Jackson and Xavier Hadley.
Location: Bell & Cohen Galleries at the Brown Arts Institute, Brown University, Providence, RI.
Related Material:
Hilarie M. Sheets, From Prison to the Art Gallery (Sept. 22, 2022)
Article subtitle: Formerly incarcerated artists [a group who exhibited their work in Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration] are making waves in the collecting world, hoping to create pathways, and dignity, for their peers.
Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (ebook) by Nicole R. Fleetwood - described in the Books box on the right of this page.
- Talking Back: Artists of the Columbia CollectiveExhibition: Sept. 3 - Sept. 25, 2022. Curated by Sofia Thieu D’Amico. Presented by Foreland & The Juvenile Justice Arts & Media Network.
Location: Foreland, 111 Water Street, Catskill, NY.
This exhibit highlighted "new site-specific works from the Columbia Collective: a multimedia group of young female and trans artists named after their previous facility, the New York Department of Corrections’ Columbia Secure Center for Girls in Claverack, New York." The artists are now incarcerated at the Brookwood Secure Center for Youth. On its web page (below), this arts group proclaims: WE AREN’T DEFINED BY JUST ONE MOMENT.
- The Columbia CollectiveVisit this site to view the powerful art of the Columbia Collective.
- Incorrigibles: Bearing Witness to the Incarcerated Girls and Women of New YorkOn Jan. 31, 2019, Brooklyn Law School hosted the panel event: Incorrigibles: Bearing Witness to the Incarcerated Girls and Women of New York. This event coincided with an exhibit at the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse. The exhibit featured "the work of artist Alison Cornyn and the Incorrigibles project, work by artist Beth Thielen, known for her one-of-a-kind artist books and public art projects; a collaborative work with embroidery artist Diana Weylan, writings by girls and women who currently are or formerly were incarcerated; and paintings by Aaliyah, a young artist [who was] enrolled in an alternative to incarceration program."
- Incorrigibles (short film directed by Alison Cornyn)"On January 24, 2018, Incorrigibles [a transmedia project & team] premiered the Incorrigibles short film, featuring the stories and voices of girls who were incarcerated at the New York State Training School for Girls in Hudson, New York."
(Running time: 13:11 min.)
Articles
Article subtitle: Five years ago, a landmark exhibition of art created by detainees began touring the U.S. But a government U-turn has blocked works from leaving the prison, raising the question: whose art is it?
Adam Bradley, The Artists Taking on Mass Incarceration, N.Y. Times Style Magazine (Aug. 11, 2022)
Tip: BLS students, faculty and administrators: Click here for instructions to create an individual account to access The New York Times. BLS students, faculty and administrators who have Lexis+ accounts also can link to this story here. (Log in required.)
Books (available through BLS Library)
Love and Abolition: The Social Life of Black Queer Performance by Call Number: HV9276.5 .R44 2022 (Main)Publication Date: 2022Excerpt from this book's prologue (p. xvii): "Rather than perceiving the persistence of settler colonialism, the military and prison industrial complexes, immigration control apparatus, and other forms of state violence as signs of defeat, writers, artists, performers, dreamers and organizers continue to posit concrete visions of another world....the Black queer performance texts constellated here certainly offer powerful opposition to the nightmarish status quo, but they also generate new forms of collectivity rooted in care, instead of in systems of criminalization, coercion, and control."
Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing, but Enough (ebook) by Publication Date: 2022In catalog record for this book, click: ACCESS ONLINE VERSION - (EBSCO). Unlimited user access. (Off-campus use: requires proxy.)
Excerpts from book description: "In poetry, dialogue and visual art the book follows two wandering poets as they make their way from village to village, across a prison colony moon full of exiled rebels, robots, and storytellers." A "toolkit for emerging poets and aspiring movement-builders."
Rebel Speak:A Justice Movement Mixtape (ebook) by Publication Date: 2022In catalog record for this book, click: ACCESS ONLINE VERSION - (EBC). Unlimited user access. First-time use of EBC platform requires BLS patrons to click: Create Account. (Off-campus use: requires proxy.)
Includes: Track #7: Live from juvi: the artivism of Maya Jupiter and Aloe Blacc, a dialogue with Rosa M. Rios (aka Rosie).
Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (ebook) by Publication Date: 2020In catalog record for this book, click: ACCESS ONLINE VERSION - (EBC). Unlimited user access. First-time use of EBC platform requires BLS patrons to click: Create Account. (Off-campus use: requires proxy.)
Excerpt from publisher's book description: "More than two million people are currently behind bars in the United States. Incarceration not only separates the imprisoned from their families and communities; it also exposes them to shocking levels of deprivation and abuse and subjects them to the arbitrary cruelties of the criminal justice system. Yet, as Nicole Fleetwood reveals, America's prisons are filled with art. Despite the isolation and degradation they experience, the incarcerated are driven to assert their humanity in the face of a system that dehumanizes them. Based on interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated artists, prison visits, and the author's own family experiences with the penal system, Marking Time shows how the imprisoned turn ordinary objects into elaborate works of art. Working with meager supplies and in the harshest conditions--including solitary confinement--these artists find ways to resist the brutality and depravity that prisons engender."
America Is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s (ebook) by Publication Date: 2010In catalog record for this book, click: ACCESS ONLINE VERSION - (EBSCO). Unlimited user access. (Off-campus use: requires proxy.)
Excerpt from book summary: "Bernstein explores the forces that sparked a dramatic 'prison art renaissance' in the 1970s, when incarcerated people produced powerful works of writing, performance, and visual art."
