Untitled (Daren), 2000, gelatin silver print, 19 7/8 x 23 7/8" [Enlarge in New Window]

Dread Scott: Lockdown

If Brooklyn-based photographer and sculptor Dread Scott's assumed name recalls that of Dred Scott, the courageous slave who sued for his freedom, it's no accident. Dred Scott, a hero of the artist and the subject of the infamous 1857 U.S. Supreme Court decision stating that Congress had no power to limit slavery in the territories, became a rallying point for the abolitionists and most likely hastened the declaration of the Civil War.

Dread Scott, like his namesake, has also been a flash point, the focus of national headlines and death threats. When still a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Scott inflamed patriotic sensibilities with his incendiary, now-historic 1989 installation, What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, which invited people to step on the flag as they responded to the question on a ledger. He was personally denounced by President George Bush Sr., and his installation was banned by the U.S. Senate for desecration. Since then, the controversial Scott, a Maoist with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute and a participant in the Whitney Museum's Independent Studies program, has received a number of awards and shown widely here and abroad in museums, alternative spaces, and sleek mainstream galleries. He remains an ardent and articulately outspoken crusader for truth, justice, and racial equality, in complex layered projects such as Historic Corrections (1998), which addresses police violence and equates it with the lynchings of a (slightly) earlier era. Others include Blue Wall of Violence (1999), another work about official brutality, and Jasper the Ghost (1999), a bitter tribute to the memory of James Byrd, a black man dragged to his death by three white men in Jasper, Texas in 1998. Shown at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, it uses asphalt, telephone poles, chains, animal bones, and a truck bumper to make a tableau that is terrible in its silence and emptiness.

One of Scott's newest ventures is Lockdown, a work in progress. Lockdown took shape in 2000 at Harvard's Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialog and various phases of it have already been shown. It consists of clean, glossy 20 x 24" black-and-white photographs of inmates and recently released prisoners, all young men, whom Scott treats as prisoners of a societal war. From his interviews with them, he has excerpted text and made an audio component to accompany the installation. He is also producing an artist's book from the photos and text, to be distributed in prisons, urban community centers, and neighborhood art spaces.

In Lockdown Scott indicts the judicial system for its "criminalization of virtually an entire race of youth," referring to the disproportionately high numbers of young African Americans and Latinos in prison. Lockdown, characteristically of Scott, shows us the penal system from the point of view of the incarcerated--black, Latino, and white. It pictures them as individuals to be confronted, their faces the focal point, each with their own history. Additionally, there are the interviews about life inside, about rage, frustration, grief, and ultimately scorn for a society that has failed so many, that has discarded them. It also shows their spirit of protest. Daren, an African American and one of Scott's subjects, observed with angry irony, "They're not correcting nothing . . . It's a system that wants to perpetuate failure."

Dread Scott, as hopeful and deeply committed as ever to strong social and political statements and to the idea that commitment makes a difference, states that good art "can give you courage. It can challenge the status quo or point to a different future."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Visual > Photography | African American Themes | Politics | New York | 2001