CARCERAL AESTHETICS

WE CAN ALL AGREE NOW that American prisons are a malignant feature of contemporary life, broadening inequalities, destroying families, worsening racial disparities, and facilitating widespread state-sanctioned premature death, to name just a few of the most obvious iniquities. But inside these prisons, people do find imaginative ways to survive. The institutional culture of incarceration has spawned individual and communal acts of inspired genius—acts credited entirely to people, and not to the prisons where they are forced to live—modalities of making and ways of surviving that involve types

print September 2020

PROJECT: NICOLE R. FLEETWOOD

TAMECA COLE began writing and making collages while imprisoned in Alabama as a way to create space for her survival. Locked in a Dark Calm, 2016, is a composite portrait; the face, enveloped in a gray cloud, is only partially revealed. She made it as a response to the mistreatment she suffered from prison guards. Commissioned for these pages, Cole’s Dark Chaos: The Aftermath, 2020, extends her compositional experimentation, juxtaposing an eye from a color photograph of the artist with one eye and the nose of George Floyd. It is both a self-portrait and a memorial to the man whose murder by