Scarlet Speakers in the Heart of Your Home: Art and Activism in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Nicole R. Fleetwood is a critic, curator, and professor of American studies and art history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is co-editor of Aperture magazine’s “Prison Nation” (Spring 2018), a special issue focusing on photography’s role in documenting mass incarcerations. She has co-curated exhibitions and public programs on art and mass incarceration at the Andrew Freedman Home, Aperture Foundation, New York; Zimmerli Museum of Art, New Brunswick; Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, Philadelphia; and Cleveland Public Library.

Her exhibitions have been praised by the Nation, New York Times, and New Yorker. She is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020), On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015), and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011), which won the Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association.