Two Rivers Gallery Opens New Exhibition That Explores the Impact of the US Prison System on Contemporary Visual Art

Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration explores the impact of the US prison system on contemporary visual art. This exhibition highlights artists who are or have been incarcerated alongside artists who have not been incarcerated but whose practices interrogate the carceral state. Seen together, their works reveal how punitive governance, predatory policing, surveillance, and mass imprisonment impact everyday life for large swaths of the American population, largely Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and impoverished peoples. Art made in prisons is crucial to contemporary culture, though it has been largely excluded from established art institutions and public discourse. Marking Time aims to shift aesthetic currents, offering new ways to envision art and to understand the reach and devastation of the US carceral state.

Using photography, painting, sculpture, video and other media artists in this exhibition reveal how incarceration transforms the fundamentals of living—time, space, and matter—and reimagine these changes to create new aesthetic possibilities. Their artworks illuminate what curator Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood calls “carceral aesthetics,” relational and artistic experiments that challenge the “inside/outside” logic of imprisonment. Such practices resonate with recent trends in relational art, histories of Black radical aesthetics, political art, and the creative traditions of earlier eras of captive people. Carceral aesthetics foregrounds innovative modes of relating that refute the dehumanization, isolation, and erasure that prisons engender.

Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration is organized by Nicole Fleetwood with exhibition coordinator Steven G Fullwood, Two Rivers Gallery, and the assistance of graduate researchers Myles Andre, Eva Cilman, and Anisa Jackson.

The exhibition debuted Sept. 17, 2020, at MoMA PS1 and since then, has been showcased at The Abroms-Engle Institute for the Visual Arts, National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Brown Arts Institute, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

This exhibition is presented jointly at Two Rivers Gallery and the Robert Frederick Gallery at University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC), accompanied by a dynamic series of public programs and educational initiatives organized with several community partners to be announced in the coming weeks.

Opening Reception

Please join us at Two Rivers Gallery for the opening reception on Thursday, April 25, at 7:30pm. Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, exhibition Curator, will be in attendance to discuss this exhibition. This event is free and open to the public.