Dread Scott: an Artist Talk

I make revolutionary art to propel history forward. I don’t accept the economic foundation, social relations and governing ideas of America. My work encourages an audience to explore important questions based upon this perspective. - Dread Scott 

The artist Dread Scott works in a range of media, including performance, photography, screen printing, installation and video, to confront the many social questions affecting humanity. His talk will present a selection of work from the past 30 years of his career, considering themes of American identity and patriotism, American democracy's roots in slavery and how that informs our present, the criminalization of Black and Latino youth, the continuum from the Civil Rights movement to the contemporary Black Lives Matter resistance, imagining a world free of oppression and exploitation, and thoughts on resistance and liberation. 

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Dread Scott's work is exhibited across the US and internationally. 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.

Photo Credit: Sebastian Kim

 

 

Erica Ball is a Professor of History and Chair of Black Studies at Occidental College. Ball is a cultural historian specializing in nineteenth and early twentieth-century African American history. Focusing on the ways African Americans have placed visual, print and other forms of cultural production in the service of the long freedom struggle, her work explores the connections between African American expressive culture, class formation, and popular representations of slavery and abolition.

 

Learn more about the WE LIVE! Memories of Resistance exhibition and related programming

This program is made possible by Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, the Remsen Bird Fund and the Arts and Urban Experience Initiative, which is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.