Nicole Fleetwood

Nicole R. Fleetwood (born February 24, 1973) is an

American academic, curator, police abolitionist, prison Nicole R. Fleetwood
abolitionist, and author. She is the inaugural James
Weldon Johnson Professor at New York University's
Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human
Development. Previously, Fleetwood was Professor of
American Studies and Art History at Rutgers
University.

Early life and education

Fleetwood grew up and attended public schools in
Hamilton, Ohio, before briefly moving to Texas, then
returning to graduate from Hamilton High School in
1990. She grew up in a large extended family of
Fleetwood in 2021
gospel, funk, and rock musicians. Her maternal
relatives, the Troutmans, created the pioneering funk Born February 24, 1973
band Zapp. Fleetwood has spoken and written about Occupation Curator
the impact of music, policing, and imprisonment on
her family and community.[1]

In 1992, Fleetwood was chosen for the Erasmus International Exchange program to study human rights
law and feminist studies at Utrecht University. In 1994, Fleetwood received a bachelor of philosophy
degree (B.Phil.) from the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Miami University of Ohio and her
master's degree and doctorate in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 1998 and
2001, respectively.[2]

Career
Fleetwood's expertise is centered on contemporary black diasporic art and visual culture, gender and
feminist studies, prison abolition, carceral studies and poverty studies.[3]

From 2001 to 2003, Fleetwood began as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of
Film and Drama at Vassar College. In 2003, she joined the faculty of the Department of American Studies
at University of California, Davis. She moved to Rutgers University, New Brunswick in 2005. Serving
from 2013 to 2016, Fleetwood became the first Black director of the Institute for Research on Women at
Rutgers.
In 2012, Fleetwood won the Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize of the American Studies
Association for her book, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality and Blackness, published in 2011
with the University of Chicago Press. She published her second book, On Racial Icons: Blackness and
the Public Imagination, in 2015 and a portion of it was translated into Italian for A fior di pelle:
Bianchezza, nerezza, visualità, a collection of chapters and essays on race and visuality.

Fleetwood has organized several programs on visual culture, poverty studies, and carceral studies. In
2014, Fleetwood co-organized with her colleague Sarah Tobias Marking Time: Prison Art and Activism, a
conference and six-site exhibition at Rutgers University based on research that she had begun in 2010 on
the visual culture of mass incarceration.[4] In 2017, she co-curated the exhibition, State Goods: Art in the
Era of Mass Incarceration, with Walter E. Puryear at the Andrew Freedman Home in the Bronx.[5] In
2018, Fleetwood collaborated with Aperture Foundation on Prison Nation, an issue of Aperture magazine
and a traveling exhibition of the same name, focusing on photography's role in documenting mass
incarceration.

In 2020, Harvard University Press published Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,
Fleetwood's decade-long study of the visual art and culture of contemporary prisons in the United States.
The book has been included in several 2020 "best books" and selected reading lists by major media and
cultural outlets such as the New York Times, The National Book Foundation and the Smithsonian. It won
the 2020 National Book Critics Award in Criticism and became the only publication to win both the
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history and the Frank Jewett Mather Award in art criticism from
the College Art Association. The exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
(September 17, 2020 – April 5, 2021) was also curated by Fleetwood at MoMA PS1 based on the text.
The exhibition was listed as "one of the most important art moments in 2020" by The New York Times,[6]
and among the best shows of the year by The New Yorker[7] and Hyperallergic.[8]' Following the
presentation at MoMA PS1, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration was exhibited at the
Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (September 17,
2021 – December 11, 2021).[9]

In 2021, Fleetwood joined New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human
Development as the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor.

Fleetwood has written art catalogue essays and cultural criticism on Angela Y. Davis,[10] John
Edmonds,[11] Gordon Parks,[12] Deana Lawson,[13] Rihanna,[14] Mickalene Thomas,[15] Fatimah
Tuggar,[16] Diana Ross, Serena Williams, and LeBron James.[17] Fleetwood's work has been covered by
major media outlets including CNN, the Atlantic, National Public Radio, the New York Times, and The
New Yorker.

Awards and honors

2021 Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship (http
s://liberalarts.tamu.edu/glasscock/programs/glasscock-book-prize/)
2021 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize (https://www.theasa.net/node/134), American
Studies Association
2021 MacArthur Fellowship[18]
2021 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in Art History, awarded by the College Art
Association for Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
 2021 Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism awarded by the College Art Association for
Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
2020 National Book Critics Circle Award (Criticism) for Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass
Incarceration
2019 Academic Writing Fellow, The Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Center, Italy
2016-2017 ACLS/NYPL Fellow, Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York
Public Library
2016-2017 Whiting Public Engagement Fellow
2012 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize of the American Studies Association
2007-2008 National Endowment for the Humanities/Ford Foundation Fellow, Schomburg
Scholar-in-Residence Program

Books
Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Harvard University Press, 2020)
On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (Rutgers University Press, 2015)
Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality and Blackness (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Interviews
NYC-ARTS Choice, WNET (https://www.nyc-arts.org/showclips/151357/nyc-arts-choice-mo
ma-ps1-marking-time-mxiqiz)
Morning Edition, NPR (https://www.npr.org/2020/10/28/925227833/marking-time-and-makin
g-art-in-confinement)
All of It with Alison Stewart (https://www.wnyc.org/story/marking-time-art-age-mass-incarcer
ation/)
Carceral Aesthetics (https://www.artforum.com/print/202007/nicole-r-fleetwood-in-conversati
on-with-rachel-kushner-83681), Conversation with novelist Rachel Kushner
The Voices of Marking Time (https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/454), MoMA
Magazine Podcast
Dreams Are Colder than Death 2014 documentary (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3954418/)
at IMDb

References
1. Dreams are colder than deaths. Dir. Arthur Jafa. 2013. Film.
2. "Nicole R. Fleetwood" (https://amerstudies.rutgers.edu/people/core-faculty/nicole-r-fleetwoo
d). amerstudies.rutgers.edu. Retrieved 2021-04-19.
3. "Nicole R. Fleetwood" (https://amerstudies.rutgers.edu/people/core-faculty/nicole-r-fleetwoo
d). amerstudies.rutgers.edu. Retrieved 2021-04-19.
4. Jacobs, Emma (2014-11-20). "Marking Time: Exhibit Shows Prison-Made Art" (https://www.
wnyc.org/story/marking-time-exhibit-shows-prison-made-art/). wnyc.org. Retrieved
2022-03-06.
5. Smith, Roberta; Schwendener, Martha (2017-06-01). "What to See in New York Art Galleries
This Week" (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/arts/design/what-to-see-in-new-york-art-g
alleries-this-week.html). The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 (https://search.worldcat.org/i
ssn/0362-4331). Retrieved 2021-04-19.
 6. Cotter, Holland; Smith, Roberta; Farago, Jason (2020-12-04). "The Most Important Moments
in Art in 2020" (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/arts/important-art-moments-2020.html).
The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 (https://search.worldcat.org/issn/0362-4331).
Retrieved 2021-04-19.
7. Scott, Andrea K. (30 December 2020). "The Best Art of 2020" (https://www.newyorker.com/c
ulture/2020-in-review/the-best-art-of-2020). The New Yorker. Retrieved 2021-04-19.
8. Cassell, Dessane Lopez (2020-12-30). "2020: A Year in New York Exhibitions and More" (htt
ps://hyperallergic.com/609351/2020-a-year-in-new-york-exhibitions-and-more/).
Hyperallergic. Retrieved 2021-04-19.
9. Patel, Marionne. "Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration - Abroms-Engel
Institute for the Visual Arts | UAB" (https://www.uab.edu/aeiva/exhibitions/marking-time).
www.uab.edu. Retrieved 2021-10-13.
10. Fleetwood, Nicole R. (2019). "Deana Lawson's Mohawk Correctional Series". In Maciejunes,
Nannette; Wolfe, M. Melissa (eds.). Reflections: The American Collection at the Columbus
Museum of Art. Columbus: Columbus Museum of Art in Association with Ohio University
Press. pp. 648–649.
11. Fleetwood, Nicole R. (30 August 2019). "The Quiet Risks of John Edmonds's Photographs |
by Nicole R. Fleetwood" (https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/08/30/the-quiet-risks-of-john-
edmondss-photographs/). The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 2021-04-19.
12. Fleetwood, Nicole R. (2020). "Policing and the Production of Crime". In Meister, Sarah (ed.).
The Atmosphere of Crime. Steidl and the Gordon Parks Foundation. pp. 74–77.
13. Fleetwood, Nicole R. (2019). "Deana Lawson's Mohawk Correctional Series". In Maciejunes,
Nannette (ed.). Reflections: The American Collection at the Columbus Museum of Art.
Columbus: Columbus Museum of Art in Association with Ohio University Press. pp. 648–
649.
14. Fleetwood, Nicole R. (2012). "The Case of Rihanna: Erotic Violence and Black Female
Desire". African American Review. 45 (3): 419–435. doi:10.1353/afa.2012.0047 (https://doi.o
rg/10.1353%2Fafa.2012.0047). S2CID 161587296 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusI
D:161587296).
15. Fleetwood, Nicole R. (2018). "Mickalene Thomas's World Making". In Shafer, Ryan (ed.).
Mickalene Thomas: I Can't See You Without Me. Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts.
pp. 57–61.
16. Fleetwood, Nicole R. (2019). "The Non-Linear Temporalities of Fatimah Tuggar's Media Art".
Fatimah Tuggar: Home's Horizons. Munich: Hirmer Publishers. pp. 50–59.
17. Fleetwood, Nicole R. (2015). On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination.
Rutgers University Press.
18. "MacArthur Foundation Announces 2021 'Genius' Grant Winners" (https://www.nytimes.com/
2021/09/28/arts/macarthur-foundation-announces-2021-genius-grant-winners.html). The
New York Times. September 28, 2021. Retrieved September 28, 2021.

External links
Nicole R. Fleetwood (https://amerstudies.rutgers.edu/faculty-menu/core-faculty/nicole-r-fleet
wood)

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nicole_Fleetwood&oldid=1257818861"