The American Carceral Landscape

Some 2.3 million people are incarcerated in the United States, but the prison system remains largely invisible to many Americans and the physical and psychological marginalization and minoritization of system-impacted people allow many to ignore mass incarceration, even as it is among the most crucial issues of our time. Inspired by Nicole Fleetwood’s notion of “carceral aesthetics,” this panel invites artists and scholars to engage with the American carceral landscape. From Alfredo Santos’s murals in the dining hall at San Quentin (1953) and Faith Ringgold’s For the Women’s House at Rikers Island (1971) to Al Black’s murals at the Central Florida Reception Center in Orlando, Florida (1997-2006), American jails and prisons have inspired artists, both incarcerated and non-incarcerated, to respond to their physical environment with visual art, but systems of power impact both the conditions under which these artists create their work and shape the circuits through which others engage with the resulting artwork. As such, this panel invites papers that engage with topics such as representations of prisons and images of those in confinement; the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and the establishment of prison art and education programs in the 1960s; the role of federal funding in prison art programs; the Angola Prison Arts and Crafts Fair; prison architecture; and the role of universities, museums, and other institutions in the care and collection of carceral art; among others.