Art History, Material Culture, and Carcerality

Session will present: On location

Research demonstrates the relationship between law, punishment, and the US racial, political, and economic landscape, but notions of carcerality have only recently entered the lexicon of art historical inquiry. Coinciding with Aperture magazine’s spring 2018 issue, the traveling exhibition Prison Nation drew attention to the role of photography in documenting mass incarceration, and, in 2020, Prison Nation curator Nicole R. Fleetwood coined the term “carceral aesthetics” in her award-winning book and accompanying exhibition, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (September 17, 2020–April 5, 2021, MoMA PS1). Other exhibitions such as Illuminating the Darkness: Our Carceral Landscape (August 27–October 1, 2020; University of Central Florida Art Gallery), Barring Freedom (October 30, 2020 – Sunday, April 25, 2021; San José Museum of Art), Breaking Out: Immigrant Art from Confinement (April 7 – May 31, 2022; Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University), The View from Here (July 6 – August 7, 2024, Richmond Art Center), and Between the Lines: Prison Art & Advocacy (August 11, 2024 - September 2, 2025; Museum of International Folk Art) similarly empowered incarcerated artists and promoted awareness of the US carceral state, but “carceral visuality,” as noted by Fleetwood, often operates “as a tool of state authority.” Inspired by the carceral turn in art history, this panel invites papers that interrogate how carceral systems are visualized, mediated, resisted, and perpetuated through material forms and artistic practices. Topics include: the aesthetics of incarceration; prison architecture; visualizations of confinement; and surveillance and visibility.

Keywords:
Geographic Area: United States of America
Time Period: Eighteenth Century to Present
Topics: Social History
Medium: Landscape
Topics: Materiality

Chair:
Keri Watson, University of Central Florida

Framed: The Scottsboro Boys and the Politics of Representation
Jody Patterson, The Ohio State University
"Community in Action": Incarceration and Self-Representation in the 1970s
Adam D. Jolles, Florida State University; Josh Ellenbogen
Exhibiting the System
Dr. Tom C. Williams, Belmont University
Abstract Submissions Closed