The 2022 UT Art Education Lecture Series welcomes Dr. Nicole Fleetwood and Sean Kelley.
Thresholds of Confinement: Art, Museums, and Prisons
This lecture is based on Dr. Fleetwood’s decade-long research and curatorial practice on the art of mass incarceration. Fleetwood will explore the concept of threshold as it pertains to captivity and collection in museums and prisons.
Making History Today
Inspired by civil rights leader Bryan Stevenson's adage that "proximity is important" when doing social justice work, Sean Kelley has led multiple large-scale projects that bring museum visitors into dialogue around subjects that might, at first, seem uncomfortable. Kelley reflects on the work of his team at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, and at other sites and memorials around the world.
Nicole R. Fleetwood is a writer, curator, and the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. She is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow and the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020), winner of the National Book Critics Award in Criticism, the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and both the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history and the Frank Jewett Mather Award in art criticism. She is also curator of the touring exhibition Marking Time, which debuted at MoMA PS1 in September 2020. Her other books are On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015) and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011). She is also co-editor of Aperture magazine’s “Prison Nation” issue, focusing on photography’s role in documenting mass incarceration, and co-curator of Aperture’s touring exhibition of the same name. Fleetwood has co/curated exhibitions and programs on art and mass incarceration at the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, the Andrew Freedman Home, Aperture Foundation, Cleveland Public Library, Eastern State Penitentiary, MoMA PS1, Mural Arts Philadelphia, the Zimmerli Art Museum, and Worth Rises. Her work has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, NYPL’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, ACLS, Whiting Foundation, the Art for Justice Fund, Denniston Hill Residency, Schomburg Center for Scholars-in-Residence, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the NEH.
Sean Kelley is a non-profit leader dedicated to creating challenging and meaningful museum experiences for broad audiences.
He oversees all aspects of the visitor experience—including all exhibits, events, visitor services and public programs—at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site in Philadelphia as the Senior Vice President. Kelley visits active prisons and writes critically about prison museums and sites of memorial. He speaks widely within the field on the responsibility of museums to address controversial and painful subjects.