No Spirit For Me

(2019)

In 2018, I acquired the contents of my father’s criminal case file from the Florida State Attorney who prosecuted him. The file included the official records used to condemn my father – court records, witness statements and police evidence photographs. Through these documents, I was able to track how the justice process failed in a case that the State hailed as an example of justice served.

Using lithography, weaving and metalwork, I re-presented over 1000 pages of these records as “hanging files” in a fictitious police evidence room. The repetitive motions of printing 1000 pages through an etching press, of tracing the shapes of redaction on the loom, of welding dozens of steel joints was a method to use my body – the site of violence – as a vehicle for justice.

Exhibition History

Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, curated by Nicole R. Fleetwood, Birmingham, AL, September 17, 2021 – December 11, 2021.

MoMA PS1, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, curated by Nicole R. Fleetwood, Long Island City, NY, September 17, 2020 – April 5, 2021.

Stamps Gallery, Dry Socks in a Submerged Canoe, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, March 15 – 31, 2019.

Selected Press

Brusie, Adrianna. “Transformations of the Invisible: Nicole Fleetwood’s Marking Time,” T Art Magazine, June 08, 2021. (Review)

Migan, Darla. “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” The Brooklyn Rail, March, 2021. (Review)

Cassell, Dessane Lopez. “2020: A Year in New York Exhibitions and More,” Hyperallergic, December 30, 2020. (Review)

Cotter, Holland, Roberta Smith and Jason Farago. “The Most Important Moments in Art in 2020,” The New York Times, December 04, 2020. (Review)