A visit to MoMA PS1 in Long Island City for a look at the exhibition “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration." The exhibition examines how artists bear witness to our society’s extensive use of imprisonment. NYC-ARTS spoke with Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University and the curator of the exhibition.
While some of the stories told here are based on factual records and real persons, they are being told purely for entertainment purposes, and are embellished with folklore and rumor. Safety precautions to abate risk inherent to these filming locations and interpersonal contact during a national health crisis were implemented and followed.
Gilberto Rivera’s “An Institutional Nightmare” (2012), made from a federal prison uniform, commissary papers, floor wax, newspaper and acrylic paint.
We’re living in a post-fact time, but that doesn’t mean there are no facts. Here are some. The United States has the largest population of captive human beings on earth, around 2.4 million, and an outsized percentage of them are Black. Since the 1980s, prison life sentences have quadrupled; the minimum age for imprisonment has dropped; the use of solitary confinement, sometimes referred to as “no-touch torture,” has grown.
The result is the prison-industrial complex we know, a punitive universe walled off from the larger world. What takes place behind those walls? Deprivation and cruelty, but also the production of art, as we learn from “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” a stirring 44-artist show at the reopened MoMA PS1.
On Saturday, April 25, The New Jersey Folk Festival hosted a series of online activities with artists of various crafts. Click here for video links to the activities on the NJFF website. The videos are also available on Youtube.
"The President quite unwell," reported John Hay on November 26, 1863. On his return from the dedication of Gettysburg National Cemetery, where he delivered "a few appropriate remarks" that would stand to define the war and the meaning of America, Abraham Lincoln had taken ill with varioloid fever, a mild but highly contagious form of smallpox. Even the New York World, a virulent anti-administration newspaper, hoped that "the President will soon be restored to health and strength."
Lincoln handled the illness with humor. He joked that since becoming president, crowds of people had asked him to give them something and now he had something he could give everyone. He also commented, in typical self-deprecating fashion, that being ill offered the consolation that the disease, which could leave scars, "cannot in the least disfigure me."
I never knew Emmett Till. Not his mischievous smile, or his fun-loving, fearless attitude, or the stutter when he got nervous. I was just a young white girl growing up in New Jersey when the Black 14-year-old from Chicago went to visit family in the Deep South in 1955.
Though I never knew him, I can vividly recall the first time I heard his name. I had just returned to college, almost two decades older than most of my classmates, when in one of my first classes I watched “Eyes on the Prize: Awakenings.” The film served as quite an awakening for me!
College campuses have been gearing up for start of the spring 2020 semester. But this week, Mohammad Shahab Dehghani Hossein Abadi, an Iranian student with a valid visa to study at Northeastern University in Boston, was stopped by Customs and Border Protection, detained and then deported — despite a federal court order that should have delayed his removal. His attorneys have no idea why CBP decided to revoke his visa or why the agency ignored the court order. Judge Richard Stearns of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts urged federal officials to return Dehghani to Boston, but dispiritingly admitted, “I don’t think they’re going to listen to me.”
Dehghani’s case appears to be part of an emerging pattern. According to the ACLU, since August last year at least 13 Iranian students arriving at U.S. airports have been barred entry and removed, despite having visas. In Dehghani’s case, he underwent a year-long vetting process before receiving his visa, a process that the CBP seems to have blithely dismissed.
Since opening in 1931, the George Washington Bridge, linking New York and New Jersey, has become the busiest bridge in the world, with over 100 million vehicles passing over it each year. Many people also consider it the most beautiful bridge in the world, yet remarkably little has been written about it. In this installment of Leonard Lopate at Large on WBAI, Michael Aaron Rockland talks about his new book on this majestic structure, “The George Washington Bridge: Poetry in Steel.”
Did you know yuletide caroling began 1,000 years before Christmas existed? Or how about the fact that mistletoe was used to represent immortality long before the holiday reached Europe? And before there was eggnog, the medieval English drank wassail made from mulled ale.
Maria Kennedy, an instructor of folklore at Rutgers University–New Brunswick’s Department of American Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences, has researched the European holiday traditions that predate – and became an inseparable part of – Christmas.
She shared her insights with Rutgers Today.
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