Nicole Fleetwood grew up in Hamilton, Ohio, where she said her family experienced the effects of over-policing and mass incarceration firsthand.
The NYU professor said her upbringing is part of the reason she wrote "Marking Time," a nationally acclaimed book documenting how incarcerated people use art to cross racial divides, build positive community, and maintain their humanity. Fleetwood said that for many, identifying as an artist becomes more important than the labels the prison system imposes on them.
Growing up in Hamilton's Second Ward, Nicole Fleetwood was surrounded by music. Her grandmother directed the choir at their Pentecostal church for 50 years, leading services that included visits to local prisons. Meanwhile, her uncles and older male cousins formed a funk band featuring Roger Troutman, creating music right in their neighborhood.
"There were just house bands everywhere," Fleetwood said. "People making music in their homes, in their garages, in their basements. We'd be walking around or on our bikes, and we would just hear the live music coming out of these modest homes in the Second Ward of Hamilton."
However, that same community faced a different reality from the late 1980s through the 1990s and into the early 2000s. The local police department, according to Fleetwood, "completely harassed and terrorized" the second ward with constant arrests and home raids.
"We're talking about a small community," she said.
Some of Fleetwood's loved ones were affected by the over-policing and ended up incarcerated. She became curious about the artwork she encountered in the visiting rooms during visits to see them.
"I literally just started writing about these images of my incarcerated loved ones from visits or images they would send me," she said. "I really tried to think both emotionally and intellectually about that exchange of images with an incarcerated loved one."
Fleetwood started meeting the artists who were in prison and asking them questions about their work, though she had no idea it would eventually become a book or exhibition.
"It was a really organic experience of working through the emotional pain as a family member, seeing loved ones just completely ripped out of community and held captive for years," she said.
When Fleetwood interviewed artists for what would become "Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration," she discovered a consistent theme. Without fail, they all said art-making was one of the only ways they could build positive community inside prison.
"Art making in prison is one of the only vehicles where people are crossing racial and ethnic divisiveness that prisons kind of engender," Fleetwood said. "Prisons create these racial apartheid systems, and art-making is one of those spaces where those boundaries get crossed and where people are making friendships and getting close across racial and ethnic differences."
The creative process also helps people maintain connections with communities outside prison walls, she said. Many artists told Fleetwood that their work became "their vehicle to getting released from prison, like getting paroled earlier, really being a part of a public life and insisting upon one's presence when the state is trying to make them invisible."
Perhaps most importantly, Fleetwood learned that art offers people a way to define themselves beyond the labels imposed by the prison system.
"One artist said, 'I was walking around with this ID card on me that called me an inmate, and I decided that my primary identification is with being an artist, not being someone held captive and labeled felon and convict, inmate — all these really punitive terms,'" she said.
"Marking Time" has won national and international awards and has been adapted into a traveling art exhibition.
This is the final piece that Mary Evans produced for WYSO before she died last week.
This story was produced at the Eichelberger Center for Community Voices at WYSO. Culture Couch is supported by the Ohio Arts Council.
