Dread Scott (lives in Brooklyn, NY) makes revolutionary art to propel history
forward. In 1989, his art became the center of national controversy over its transgressive use of the
American flag, while he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. President G.H.W.
Bush called his art “disgraceful” and the entire US Senate denounced and outlawed this work. Dread
became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others defied the new law by burning flags on
the steps of the U.S. Capitol.
Click here for an interactive transcript of this interview
Stop
Stop, 2012
Two-channel HD projected video
7:16 minutes
Courtesy of the artist
Dread Scott’s video installation Stop depicts three young Black men from East New York,
Brooklyn,
projected facing three young Black men from Norris Green, Liverpool. The men each look directly into the
camera and recount the number of times that they have been stopped by police. Stop was created
as part
of "Postcode Criminals,"" a collaboration between Dread Scott, Joann Kushner, and young adults from
Brooklyn and Liverpool. This series of workshops highlighted the similar experiences of people of color
living on opposite sides of the Atlantic. The similarity is no coincidence. In 1996, high-ranking police
officers from New York and Liverpool met to discuss zero-tolerance policing strategies. Over the
following years, Black youth and other people of color in the two communities were subject to a
particularly high intensity of “stop and frisk” policing. Stop illuminates the unyielding
repetition of
this systemic discrimination.
While Black
#WhileBlack, 2018
Diptych screen print
Courtesy of the artist
#WhileWhite, 2020
Screen print
Courtesy of the artist
The experience of racism is the subject of Scott’s diptych #WhileBlack and new work
#WhileWhite.
#WhileBlack lists some of the innocuous actions that have led to the deaths of Black
individuals in the
US while, in sharp contrast, #WhileWhite spells out some of the harmful privileges
attached to
Whiteness. The use of the hashtag refers to the way these incidents, often accompanied by
graphic
videos, circulate in our media landscape.
Dread Scott’s work has been included in exhibitions at New York's MoMA PS1, the Walker Art
Center,
Minneapolis, Jack Shainman Gallery, NY, and Gallery MOMO in Cape Town, South Africa. His
performance
work has been presented at BAM in Brooklyn and on the streets of Harlem, NY. Work is in the
collection
of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum. It has been featured on the cover
of
Artforum, the front page of The New York Times and in Vanity Fair.
Dread is a recipient of a 2018
United States Artists Fellowship and grants from the Creative Capital Foundation and the Open
Society
Institute. He works in a range of media from performance and photography to screen-printing and
video.
Suggested Reading
Avakian, Bob. BAsics, from the Talks and Writings of Bob Avakian. Original
Edition. Chicago: RCP Publications, 2011.
Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People
in America from the Civil War to World War II. First edition. New York:
Doubleday, 2008.
Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.