Photos of “White People Can't Be Trusted with Power”
2021 Guggenheim Fellow Dread Scott's White People Can't Be Trusted with Power is the third installment in our free Public Art Series. The materials of Dread Scott’s pieces are wide-ranging—billboards and flags and ledgers, paintings and workshops and t-shirts, stickers and money and people—but his interrogation of power, aimed at spurring transformative thought, remains constant. “I make revolutionary art to propel history forward,” reads the opening line of his artist statement. Scott brings American histories of lynchings, slave rebellions, and court decisions into the present; and today's drone strikes, police killings, and foreign wars he connects to the legacies of a violent past. To illuminate these violences, Scott often engages directly with the public itself: tourists and Wall Street brokers, museum-goers and passersby, firefighters and protestors.
Scott emphasizes the clarity and socially propulsive nature of his vision: “I look towards an era without exploitation or oppression. I don’t accept the political structures, economic foundation, social relations and governing ideas of America. This perspective has empowered me to make artworks that view leaders of slave revolts as heroes, challenge American patriotism as a unifying value, burn the U.S. Constitution (an outmoded impediment to freedom), and position the police as successors to lynch mob terror.” Below, find images of his installation; all photos by Marc J. Franklin.
A Note from the Curators
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
