Celebrate National Book Month With The 22nd Annual Susanne M. Glasscock Book Prize Winner
Nicole R. Fleetwood is this year’s recipient of the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship. Read her book, “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” this National Book Month!
Nicole R. Fleetwood is this year’s recipient of the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship.
October is National Book Month! Celebrate with the 22nd Annual Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship winner, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Nicole R. Fleetwood.
Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration highlights artists who are currently and formerly incarcerated and is based on interviews, prison visits, and the experience of families of the incarcerated. Despite the brutal dynamics of prison life creating isolation and depravity, artists nonetheless assert their humanity through their drive to create art out of ordinary objects with meager supplies in unimaginable conditions. Through art, the imprisoned have a political voice. Marking Time captures the contemporary art that testifies to the racial injustices that underpin the American penal system.
“[An] ambitious book… Fleetwood deftly weaves personal narrative together with nuanced readings of artworks created by incarcerated people in order to illustrate how, in her own words, ‘art in prison is a practice of survival, an aesthetic journey that documents time in captivity, a mode of connecting with others.’” Kimberly Probolus said in a review from Smithsonian. “She models how creative expression can build the coalitions necessary for imagining and realizing a more just society.”
Fleetwood is a writer, curator, and the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is also curator of the exhibition Marking Time at MoMA PS1; co-editor of Aperture magazine’s “Prison Nation” issue, focusing on photography’s role in documenting mass incarceration; and co-curator of Aperture’s touring exhibition of the same name.
Marking Time highlights artists who are currently and formerly incarcerated.
“Fleetwood offers something that has been missing from all the talk about incarceration in America: where words fail, there is art. Art, as Fleetwood explains, becomes a way of being seen, a way of making the shackles visible,” Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Felon, said. “This is a book that reveals what’s been ignored.”
In addition to winning the Susanne M. Glasscock Book Prize, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration is also the winner of the National Book Critics Award in Criticism, the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history, and the Frank Jewett Mather Award in art criticism. Fleetwood’s other books include On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness.
Fleetwood has co/curated exhibitions and programs on art and mass incarceration at the Andrew Freedman Home, Aperture Foundation, Cleveland Public Library, Eastern State Penitentiary, MoMA PS1, Mural Arts Philadelphia, the Zimmerli Art Museum, and Worth Rises. Her work has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, NYPL’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, ACLS, Whiting Foundation, the Art for Justice Fund, Denniston Hill Residency, Schomburg Center for Scholars-in-Residence, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the NEH.
Dr. Fleetwood will be (virtually) visiting Texas A&M in early March 2022 to receive the prize and discuss Marking Time with the campus and wider community. Further information coming soon!
About the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize
The Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship was endowed in December 2000 by Melbern G. Glasscock, Texas A&M University Class of ‘59, in honor of his wife. Together, among many other generous gifts to Texas A&M University, they provided a naming endowment for the Glasscock Center in 2002. Click here for a history of the Prize.