The ninth session of the Dialogues Across the African World cycle is an invitation to reflect, with the American artist Dread Scott, on the impact of revolutionary art on society, in the US and beyond.
Dread Scott makes revolutionary art to propel history forward. He doesn't accept the economic foundation, social relations and governing ideas of America. His work encourages an audience to explore important questions based upon this perspective.
In this talk, Dread Scott will present a range of works in multiple media, spanning his 30-year career. Performance, photography, screen printing, installation and video works will be addressed. The works that he will present will look at themes including:
• American identity and patriotism
• American democracy's roots in slavery and how that sets the stage for our present.
• The criminalization of Black and Latino youth
• The continuum connecting the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s to contemporary Black Lives Matter resistance to murder by police
• Imagining a world free of oppression and exploitation
• Peoples’ strivings to be free oppression and thoughts about resistance and liberation
Dread Scott is an interdisciplinary artist who for three decades has made work that encourages viewers to re-examine cohering ideals of American society. 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. Dread Scott became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others defied federal law outlawing his art by burning flags on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. In 1990, the Supreme Court ruled in his favour.
His work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, the Walker Art Center, Jack Shainman Gallery, and Gallery MOMO in Cape Town, South Africa, and is in the collection of the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. He is the recipient of numerous grants, including a 2019 Open Society Foundations’s Soros Equality Fellowship and, most recently, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship.
In 2019 he presented Slave Rebellion Reenactment, a community engaged project that reenacted the largest rebellion of enslaved people in US history. The project was featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Guardian, and CNN. Artnet.com has highlighted this project as one of the most important artworks of the decade.
The Dialogues Across the African World cycle is presented by école des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Cité internationale des arts, and run by Dominique Malaquais (CR, CNRS-IMAF), Julie Peghini (MCF, Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis University-CEMTI), Christine Douxami (MCF HDR, Franche-Comté University-IMAF) and Sarah Fila-Bakabadio (MCF, CY Cergy Paris Université-AGORA).