Notes on “White People Can't Be Trusted with Power”

Artist Dread Scott’s uncompromising scrutiny of the American narrative is an insistent re-evaluation of our cultural psyche. He takes us on a deep dive through our country’s history, giving equal attention to lynching, Wall Street, the slave trade, police killings, and foreign wars. The artist reveals it all through his revolutionary lens, but never from a distance — he directly engages with his subject matter and his audience, regardless of whether the work is situated inside a museum or on the streets alongside us. He is never content to simply observe, as illustrated by his landmark work, What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, which was instrumental in the Supreme Court decision that declared laws banning flag desecration to be unconstitutional.
  
Scott’s practice encompasses multiple mediums, from billboards to flags, paintings to printmaking, performance to public art. In these two installations for Playwrights Horizons, the artist asks us to not only imagine a world beyond American hegemony (the main picture window to the left), but imagine how we might get there (the large vitrine to the right.) 
 
Avram Finkelstein and David Zinn, co-curators