1834 Ohio Penitentiary founded.
1870 The Ohio State University founded.
1878 Columbus Museum of Art founded (as Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts).
1929 Writer Chester Himes enters Ohio Pen.
1930 Ohio Pen fire kills over 300 inmates.
1934 Chester Himes’ short story about the Ohio Pen fire (“To What Red Hell?”) from the perspective of a white prisoner named Blackie is published in Esquire; Himes transferred to London Prison Farm, Ohio.
1945 French filmmaker Chris Marker writes 1945 short story “Till the end of time”, which will be published in Esprit in 1947.
1953 Cast the First Stone, Chester Himes novel based on his time in Ohio Pen published by Coward McCann, from the perspective of a white prisoner called Jimmy, heavily edited and bowdlerized version of Himes’ original manuscript. Alternative title options included Debt of Time and Solitary.
1962 Chris Marker films Parisian life during the month of May as a response to the protests at Charrone metro, where 8 people are killed. Marker’s film La Jetée released.
1963 Marker’s Le Joli Mai released. The film ends with an interview with a female inmate of the Petite Roquette prison in Paris and the voiceover narration: As long as poverty exists, you’re not rich, as long as despair exists, you’re not happy; as long as prisons exist you are not free.
1964 Artist and critic Donald Judd published “Local History” a survey of the New York Art world.
1968 Chris Marker films footage of the 1968 Paris protests, including unidentified female prisoners (in Petite Roquette?). Novelist and poet Kay Boyle is imprisoned for anti-Vietnam War protest in San Francisco.
1971 Attica prison uprising in New York State. Prisoners create a temporary liberated zone from which they could see the stars. Uprising violently put down by police on the orders of Governor Nelson Rockfeller.
1975 French philosopher Michel Foucault publishes Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Kay Boyle writes the poem “A Poem for February First 1975” about the Attica prison riot.
1980 Art historian and critic Douglas Crimp publishes essay “On the Museum’s Ruins”.
1982 William T. Kirk found guilty (along with 6 other white inmates) of ‘well-planned execution’ of two black inmates at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Tennessee.
1984 Closure of the Ohio Pen. The US prison incarceration rate is around 180 per 100,000 people.
1985 TV movie Love on the Run, set in Columbus and shot in the abandoned Ohio Pen, starring Alec Baldwin and Stephanie Zimbalist, airs on NBC. The film is based on the escape of William T. Kirk with the aid of his lawyer Mary Evans from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Tennessee.
1988 Museum historian and theorist Tony Bennett publishes “The Exhibitionary Complex”, responding to Crimp’s essay on museums and Foucault’s book on prisons.
1989 Chris Marker makes L’héritage de la chouette (The Owl’s Legacy), a 13-part documentary mini-series about the legacies of ancient Greece. David Hammons makes his installation work Chasing the Blue Train.
1990 Artist Jason Simon films Super 8 footage inside the abandoned Ohio Pen, with Wexner Center curator Bill Horrigan and artist Moyra Davey.
1995 Chris Marker gives Jason Simon recordings of him playing piano music.
1997 Artist Pope. L starts his Skin Set Project.
1998 Demolition of the Ohio Pen. Release of Chester Himes’ novel Yesterday Will Make You Cry, the original and uncensored version of Cast the First Stone. The US prison incarceration rate is now over 400 per 100,000.
2006 Emails between Chris Marker and Bill Horrigan about Marker’s still images of recent protests in Paris. Classicist Richard Fletcher visits the Wexner Center for the Arts during a campus visit to Ohio State, seeing Astra Taylor’s 2005 film Žižek! and the exhibition Part Object, Part Sculpture. Later that year, Fletcher takes up a tenure-track position in the Department of Greek and Latin at Ohio State University; meets Bill Horrigan.
2007 Chris Marker: Staring Back at the Wexner Center for the Arts, curated by Bill Horrigan, displaying photographs and stills from his films, emphasizing how he documents and intervenes in political protest from the 1960s to the 2000s.
2008 Email from Bill Horrigan to Richard Fletcher requesting return of Inner Time of Television book (by The Otolith Group and Chris Marker about The Owl’s Legacy a television documentary about the legacies of ancient Greece).
2010 Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness published. Pope. L makes Red People Are My Mother When She Sick and Visiting Me in the Hospital, as part of his Skin Set Project. According to Census data 2,336 per 100,000 black people are incarcerated compared with 422 per 100,000 white people. In Ohio, while black people make up only 12% of the state’s population, they make up 435 of the prison population (compared to 81% and 52% in the case of white people).
2011 Revised edition of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow published, with new preface by intellectual and philosopher Cornel West.
2012 guysintrouble uploads a clip of Love on the Run to YouTube; Richard Fletcher starts Minus Plato a blog about Classics and Contemporary Art. First photos in the series of prison studio portraits that artist Deana Lawson will use in her work Mohawk Correctional Facility: Jazmin & Family, 2012-14.
2013 Bill Horrigan introduces a screening of Chris Marker’s Le Joli Mai in the Film/Video Theater at the Wexner. Blues for Smoke is on show in the galleries, including works from Pope. L’s Skin Set Project and artist David Hammons’ Chasing the Blue Train. Cornel West is interviewed as part of the project.
2014 Literature professor Clare Rolens publishes her article “Write Like a Man? Chester Himes and the Criminal Text Beyond Bars” which argues that Himes’ novel Yesterday Will Make You Cry was censored by his publishers for the release in 1953 (under the title Cast the First Stone) on account of its redemptive homosexual happy ending. Jason Simon makes In and Around the Ohio Pen, using 1990 footage and Marker soundtrack. Publication of catalogue for Whitechapel Gallery exhibition Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat, including a translation of Marker’s 1945 short story “Till the End of Time”
2016 The Wexner hosts the panel “Black Studies and the Fight Against Mass Incarceration”, which included Michelle Alexander speaking with professors, students and activists of the Ohio State University and Columbus community, planned to coincide with the release and screening of Ava DuVernay‘s 2016 documentary 13th, which builds on Alexander’s book and in which she appears.
2017 Pope. L’s Red People Are My Mother When She Sick and Visiting Me in the Hospital shown at documenta 14 in Kassel. Bennett’s essay “The Exhibitionary Complex” is republished in The documenta 14 Reader, with a new introductory essay. Richard Fletcher, while posting on his blog Minus Plato every day, visits documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel. Sable Elyse Smith makes the video Men Who Swallow Themselves in Mirrors, during which the Al Green’s song Love and Happiness starts, stops and then repeats across the video diary of the artist’s incarcerated father, filmed as he is shaving his head.
2018 Jackie Wang’s book Carceral Capitalism published. William Kentridge: the Refusal of Time exhibition, for Richard Fletcher creates a Minus Plato questionnaire called Alarm Clock Academy. Deana Lawson’s sequence of prison studio portraits Mohawk Correctional Facility: Jazmin & Family, 2012–14, is shown at the Family Pictures exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art and the work is purchased by the museum. Artist talk by Sable Elyse Smith at the Beeler Gallery in Columbus, during which she shows her video Men Who Swallow Themselves in Mirrors. Richard Fletcher moves from the OSU Department of Classics to the OSU Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy. The exhibition, To What Red Hell, curated by Jason Simon, opens at the Angela Meleca Gallery in downtown Columbus, Ohio, showing work in and around the Ohio Pen by Leni D. Anderson, Mary Jo Bole, Moyra Davey, Masumi Hyashi, William E. Jones, Logan Rollins and the 511 Jazz Ensemble, Jason Simon. Bill Horrigan and Richard Fletcher invited by Simon to have a conversation for the gallery guide, which will also reproduce Chester Himes’ 1934 short story after which the exhibition was named.
2043 The year in which the population of the US is projected to be majority non-white (a key fact in the work of the Native American artist collective Postcommodity).