Past Events

Artist and illustrator Bianca Diaz will discuss her career and most recent book, See You Soon (written by New York Times best-selling author Mariame Kaba), a poignant, beautifully illustrated children’s book about a little girl named Queenie who worries when her Mama gets sick and goes to jail. Will Mama have a warm bed to sleep in? Will she get better? Can love bridge the distance between them?

American Artist and Yale professor Elizabeth Hinton will join MCC professor Nicole R. Fleetwood for a discussion of their work. The conversation will focus on their sustained engagement with racialized surveillance and criminalization; anti-Black policies; and the past, present, and future/dissolution of the US carceral state. Register online.

Join AEIVA for an engaging discussion with several artists featured in the “Marking Time” exhibition focusing on centering incarceration in their art. Moderated by curator Nicole Fleetwood, Ph.D.

“Theatre’s Call to Action,” a Birmingham Southern College course, will present a special reading of “Men’s Training” by Daoud Boone, a playwright who is incarcerated at Limestone Correctional Facility. Registration is required to attend this virtual event.

Readings created by and read by UAB’s Department of English students with select readings from the Jefferson County Memorial Project blog by alumni of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute’s Youth Legacy program. Registration is required to attend this virtual event.

Register Online

Free chamber music performed by some of Alabama’s top musicians and thoughtfully curated in response to artworks currently on display in AEIVA’s current exhibition, “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” Presented by AEIVA and the UAB College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Music. Organized by Laura Usiskin, cellist for the Alabama Symphony. Registration is required to attend this virtual event. Register online.

Join AEIVA staff for a tour of current exhibitions, followed by a film screening and discussion related to AEIVA’s current exhibition “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” Tour starts at 6 p.m.

Join us for a lively panel discussion at AEIVA with journalists, educators and advocates discussing the impact of the carceral state in Alabama. Registration is required to attend this virtual event. Register online.

Saturday, October 9th, 4:00pm EST. Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood in conversation with: Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter aka Isis Tha Saviour, Jared Owens. & Gilberto Rivera

Martos Gallery is pleased to host a conversation between artists Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, Jared Owens, Gilberto Rivera and Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, author and curator of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, and recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2021. The artists will discuss their innovative practices, formed under carceral conditions newly elucidated by Fleetwood’s scholarship and exhibitions, on the occasion of The Collective: Chosen Family, at Martos through October 23. This discussion will be streamed live on Martos Gallery’s instagram and will be linked on the website following the event.

Join AEIVA for an opening night panel discussion for “Marking Time,” a major exhibition exploring the works of artists within United States prisons and the centrality of incarceration to contemporary art and culture. Registration is required to attend this virtual event.

Systemic Impact: Process and Experimentation of (Formerly) Incarcerated Artists. SHAG, in collaboration with the Art for Justice Fund, presents a special exhibition, Systemic Impact: Process and Experimentation of (Formerly) Incarcerated Artists. The presentation is organized by Nicole Fleetwood and Jesse Krimes.

.Abolitionist Imaginaries was an online program serving as an interdisciplinary space for presentations and discussions from a diverse range of scholars, artists, and activists focused on historicizing, theorizing, and deconstructing the carceral state and its expansive and diffusive structures and economies. Panels considered histories, practices, institutions, and collective movements to transform and abolish carceral frameworks.

Conversations between Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter and her fellow artists in Marking Time, bring a wide range of voices into dialogue to consider how bonds are forged through and around creative practice in the face of state-imposed separation. How does incarceration impact existing relationships, and how can art construct new forms of connection—a “chosen family”—in turn?

.Abolitionist Imaginaries was an online program serving as an interdisciplinary space for presentations and discussions from a diverse range of scholars, artists, and activists focused on historicizing, theorizing, and deconstructing the carceral state and its expansive and diffusive structures and economies. Panels considered histories, practices, institutions, and collective movements to transform and abolish carceral frameworks.

.A program honoring the life, work, and immense impact of artist Ronnie Goodman (1960-2020)

.An evening of musical performances from BL Shirelle and Naomi Blount Wilson, a virtual performance from currently incarcerated Americana band Territorial, and discussions about the difficulties and joys of making music while in prison.

Presented in conjunction with Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, Pens to Pictures co-presents an evening of screenings and conversation. Pens to Pictures is a filmmaking collaborative that teaches and empowers incarcerated women to make their own short films, from script to screen. During its inaugural year in 2016, five films were made in a partnership between women in Dayton Correctional Institution (DCI) and communities of artists based in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. This program will include screenings of BANG! (2016) by Kamisha Thomas, Love or Loyalty (2016) by Tyra Patterson, Transparent (2016) by Jamie Ochs, The Devastating Game (2016) by Beverly Fears, and For They Know Not (2016) by Aimee Wissman. A talkback moderated by curator, writer, and editor, Dessane Lopez Cassell concludes the program.

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Nicole Fleetwood in conversation with artist Kevin Jerome Everson, co-hosted by MIT List Visual Arts Center and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati

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Distinguished Lecture Series

Nicole Fleetwood in conversation with scholar Elizabeth Hinton, author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America

New Social Environment Panel with Nicole Fleetwood, artist Gil Batle, artist Ray Materson, and gallerist Frank Maresca, moderated by Rail Editor-at-Large Choghakate Kazarian

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August 5, 2020: Narrative Medicine Rounds series in conversation with artist Lisette Oblitas and scholar Nigel Hatton, Columbia University

Gordon Parks Panel/ Live Q&A with Nicole Fleetwood, scholar Khalil G. Muhammad, and MoMA curator Sarah Meister

Book talk and Q&A

Open Call for Clemency Panel: Prison Art as Activism

Nicole Fleetwood in conversation with Antwaun Sargent, author of The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion

Book talk and Q&A

Book talk and Q&A

Nicole Fleetwood in conversation with Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black

Nicole Fleetwood in conversation with scholar Ruha Benjamin, author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

A Deeper Dive Conversation: Marking Time: Prisons in the Lives of Black Women

Nicole Fleetwood in conversation with artists and activists Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, Asia Johnson, and Michelle Jones about the impact of prisons on black women and their activism to get people released from carceral facilities during the pandemic

Nicole Fleetwood in conversation with artists James Hough & Russell Craig, moderated by activist Carl Dix

muraLAB: Art in Action—Morality of the Moment

Panel discussion with Mural Arts Reimagining Reentry Fellow Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, Philadelphia DA Artist-in-Residence James Hough, Greg Corbin of Mural Arts, and Jasmine Heiss of the Vera Institute of Justice