This July, we’re examining how artists in the Brooklyn Museum collection have dissected liberty, as a monument and as a concept, in the context of the United States.
Dread Scott describes his work as “revolutionary art to propel history forward.” Scott’s 2014 performance, On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide, highlights the foundational hypocrisy of a nation claiming "liberty and justice for all," but never reckoning with the violence against Black and Indigenous people that r sanctioned its economic and geographic expansion. During the performance, the artist is repeatedly pushed backward as he attempts to walk directly into the pressurized jet of a fire hose. Fire hoses were used by police to dispel and suppress peaceful anti-segregation protesters, including children, during the 1963 Civil Rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama. Scott also employs the "hands up, don't shoot" gesture that emerged as a symbol against police violence following the 2014 killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and is echoed today in continuing Black Lives Matter protests. (Today marks 50 consecutive days of protests in New York.) By collapsing 20th-century movements and present-day activism, Scott asks us to remember and learn from these legacies, as we carry them forward.
Posted by Carmen Hermo
Dread Scott (American, born 1965). On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide, Performance Stills 1-2, 2016. Inkjet print. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Contemporary Art Acquisitions Committee, 2016.25.1-2. © artist or artist's estate
