Books by Nicole R. Fleetwood
Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System (CONTEMPORARY AR)
by Michel Foucault, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Elizabeth Alexander, Andy Campbell, Bill Arning, Stephen Eisenman, Nicole R. Fleetwood, Evan Bissell, Melanie Crean
Walls Turned Sideways accompanies the largest museum presentation to investigate the criminal justice system in the US. What is the social role and responsibility of the artist in times of political urgency? What functions can only art and artists fulfill in the political landscape? This catalog discusses the work of more than 30 artists from across the nation, with works spanning the past 40 years, who address the criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex. The book’s title derives from a quote by political activist and author Angela Davis: “Walls turned sideways are bridges.” Artists featured include Josh Begley, Zach Blas, Luis Camnitzer, James Drake, Chris Burden, Martin Wong, Andrea Fraser, Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia, Titus Kaphar, Kapwani Kiwanga, Autumn Knight, Deana Lawson, Shaun Leonardo, Glenn Ligon, Lucky Pierre, Mark Menjivar, Trevor Paglen, Anthony Papa, Laurie Jo Reynolds, Dread Scott and Rodrigo Valenzuela. The book comes with two inserts: a poster by Ashley Hunt on the prison industrial complex, and a pamphlet of comics by various artists.
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Mickalene Thomas: I Can’t See You Without Me
by Antwaun Sargent, Nicole R. Fleetwood, Michael Goodson, Beverly Guy-Sheftall
Deconstructing the charged connections between sitter, artist and viewer
Presenting paintings of some of the artist's key models and muses, I Can't See You Without Me illuminates the work of Brooklyn painter Mickalene Thomas (born 1971). Culling from art history and popular culture, Thomas creates scintillating portraits that deconstruct the highly charged connections between sitter, artist and viewer. Whether depicted as classically composed 19th-century odalisques, Afro-adorned vixens of blaxploitation films or as a powerful maternal figure yearning for social mobility, the recurring models in Thomas' compositions (almost exclusively women of color) convey a spirit of strength and self-confidence. Across this archetypal array, it is both their contradictions and kinships that make the black female body such fertile terrain for the artist's ongoing investigations. By casting herself, her late mother and other formidable women in her life as models, muses and collaborators, Thomas particularizes her distinctive oeuvre of portraiture. Focused yet expansive, the catalog both reasserts and further contextualizes issues of identity, sexuality and agency in Thomas' work that have only become more nuanced and palpable over time.
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Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness
Troubling Vision addresses American culture’s fixation on black visibility, exploring how blackness is persistently seen as a problem in public culture and even in black scholarship that challenges racist discourse. Through trenchant analysis, Nicole R. Fleetwood reorients the problem of black visibility by turning attention to what it means to see blackness and to the performative codes that reinforce, resignify, and disrupt its meaning. Working across visual theory and performance studies, Fleetwood asks, How is the black body visualized as both familiar and disruptive? How might we investigate the black body as a troubling presence to the scopic regimes that define it as such? How is value assessed based on visible blackness?
Fleetwood documents multiple forms of engagement with the visual, even as she meticulously underscores how the terms of engagement change in various performative contexts. Examining a range of practices from the documentary photography of Charles “Teenie” Harris to the “excess flesh” performances of black female artists and pop stars to the media art of Fatimah Tuggar to the iconicity of Michael Jackson, Fleetwood reveals and reconfigures the mechanics, codes, and metaphors of blackness in visual culture.
“Troubling Vision is a path-breaking book that examines the problem of seeing blackness—the simultaneous hyper-visibility and invisibility of African Americans—in US visual culture in the last half century. Weaving together critical modes and methodologies from performance studies, art history, critical race studies, visual culture analysis, and gender theory, Fleetwood expands Du Bois’s idea of double vision into a broad questioning of whether ‘representation itself will resolve the problem of the black body in the field of vision.’ With skilled attention to historical contexts, documentary practices, and media forms, she takes up the works of a broad variety of cultural producers, from photographers and playwrights to musicians and visual artists and examines black spectatorship as well as black spectacle. In chapters on the trope of ‘non-iconicity’ in the photographs of Charles (Teenie) Harris, the ‘visible seams’ in the digital images of the artist Fatimah Tuggar, and a coda on the un-dead Michael Jackson, Fleetwood's close analyses soar. Troubling Vision is a beautifully written, original, and important addition to the field of American Studies.”—Announcement of the American Studies Association for the 2012 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize
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