Dread Scott: We're Going to End Slavery. Join Us!

Dread Scott: We’re Going to End Slavery.

Join Us! A

ISBN: 978-1-7355856-6-6

Dread Scott: We’re Going to End Slavery.

Join Us!

September 17 – December 18, 2021

CRISTIN TIERNEY GALLERY 219 BOWERY, FLOOR 2, NEW YORK, NY 10002

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The Slave Rebellion Reenactment Project Dread Scott’s first solo gallery exhibition in 20 years, We’re Going to End Slavery. Join Us!, features largescale performance stills and flags from the artist’s 2019 community-engaged performance Slave Rebellion Reenactment. This heavily researched, multi-day project reimagined the largest rebellion of enslaved people in American history.

In November 2019, hundreds of Black reenactors in period attire retraced the 24-mile path of the German Coast Uprising of 1811. The procession marched through the River Parishes upriver from New Orleans and concluded in the city ending in Congo Square, a location instrumental to preserving African culture in the United States. Envisioned and organized by Scott, Slave Rebellion Reenactment embodied a story of resistance, freedom and revolutionary action.

The reenactors, many on horses, were a formidable and impressive sight as they carried flags and brandished weapons, wearing 19th-century French colonial garments and singing in Creole and English to African drumming. The flags—imagined versions of what the enslaved people might have carried— showcase Creole language and iconography from various African traditions that could have been familiar to some of the rebels.

The procession was startlingly incongruous as the participants advanced past modern-day neighborhoods, strip malls, and oil refineries. This anomaly created a cognitive dissonance for viewers, opening a space for people to rethink long held assumptions about our history. Slave Rebellion Reenactment continued the original rebel’s vision of emancipation and allowed participants and audience members to imagine new possibilities.

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“We’re Going to End Slavery. Join Us!” Remembering Dread Scott’s Slave Rebellion Reenactment Dread Scott doesn’t make it easy for you —Janet Henry, artist

Among history’s best-known quotes is one of the least accurately remembered: George Santayana’s classic dictum against forgetting—“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The Spanish-American philosopher penned it in 1905, in a book about the forces of reason, progress, and unbridled savagery. But what if you don’t know your history? Could acting it out keep you from repeating it?

Two hundred and ten years ago, on the eve of January 8, 1811, in what was once called Louisiana “Plantation Country” and is now popularly referred to as “Cancer Alley”—after the nearly 150 oil refineries, plastics plants, and chemical facilities that line the lower end of the Mississippi River—more than 500 enslaved human beings took up arms in the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history. They carried cane knives (used to harvest the area’s cash crop, sugar cane), clubs, hoes, and few guns as they marched toward New Orleans, the local seat of economic and coercive power. They took up the chants of “Onto New Orleans,” “Freedom or death,” “We’re going to end slavery,” and, even more hopefully, “Join us!”

As porticoed plantation homes were put to the torch, many threw down their yokes and joined their company.

On the second day of the rebellion the insurgents were accosted by U.S. troops and planter’s militias and turned back from their final destination: NOLA’s Vieux Carré, where free Black allies awaited.

The repression that ensued was the direct result of full-throttle antebellum white supremacy; astoundingly, it gave way not to vengeful reprisals among the rebels but to the era’s most radical enactment of Enlightenment ideals on U.S. soil. According to Leon Waters, chairman of the Louisiana Museum of African American History, the revolt modeled itself after the

1804 Haitian revolution—copies of the Declaration of the Rights of Man were found in the rebel’s quarters— and was intended to establish nothing less than “an independent Black republic.” A direct descendant of one of the 1811 rebels, Waters today rightly deems this episode: “one of the most suppressed and hidden stories of African-American history.”

On November 8 and 9 of 2019, the artist Dread Scott—already celebrated for, among other inspired outrages, sparking a landmark Supreme Court case that made flag burning “protected speech” and attracting the pique of a sitting U.S. President (George Bush Sr. called his work “disgraceful”)— led volunteers in a mass performance he titled Slave Rebellion Reenactment. Part live theater and part Trump-era protest, Scott’s reenactment retraced the 24-mile path of “the German Coast Uprising”—so called after the European immigrants who populated the area in the 1700s. The march featured hundreds of Black reenactors, 19th-century colonial costumes, horses and riders, speeches in Creole and English, African drumming, and a film crew led by celebrated Ghanian filmmaker John Akomfrah.

Six years in the making, Slave Rebellion Reenactment was designed, in the words of Vanity Fair writer Julian Lucas, as a kind of galvanizing “social choreography.” By engineering incongruous time-and-place mashups—Scott’s performance stills depict period reenactors marching past refineries, box stores, strip malls, and elementary schools—the artist deliberately sought to provoke a wide range of reactions. (“The legacy of slavery,” Scott told Lucas, “should be in the way and causing trouble.”) No surprise, then, that the production encountered different kinds of attention: from sympathetic recognition to thinly veiled outrage.

Online evidence documents the overwhelming encouragement Scott’s performers received on their 7

two-day march. As expected, links to agitated onlookers also exist. As documented by Guardian journalist Oliver Laughland on Twitter, one White lady went so far as to deny the letter and the spirit of the reenactment. “This is not historically accurate,” she intoned with the certainty a flat earther (or an anti-vaxxer).

“This did not exist.”

at that time.” About these figures, Scott has declared: “Their solution was to end slavery, not to form a super PAC and see only if they could get whipped Monday through Friday.” As an artist uniquely committed to “revolutionary art to propel history forward,” it was paramount that Scott find the right vehicle to tell these heroes’ story.

But, of course, the 1811 rebellion did exist, despite the efforts of multiple generations of White Southerners and their informationally siloed kin to bury the legacy of slavery under cover of centuries of racist mythmaking, Jim Crow laws, Dixiecrat segregationism, Confederate monuments, GOP textbook mandates, and sundry “official narratives.”

If reenactment culture in the U.S. has largely been the province of reactionary Whites—their whitewashed plantation home “recreations” still misted with cataract-inducing moonlight and sickly-sweet magnolia—Scott’s two-day long performance presents itself as more than a forgotten narrative.

It is, instead, a crucial story of Black heroism in America. An account of physical revolt against man’s inhumanity to man to match accounts of the Biblical Israelites—or the uprisings in Sobibor, Haiti, or Algeria the story relayed by Slave Rebellion Reenactment doesn’t just memorialize the past, it demands that its performance directly inform the present.

Inspired by Leon Waters’ accounts, as well as the 1995 book by Albert Thrasher (On to New Orleans!: Louisiana’s Heroic Slave Revolt, 1995), Scott searched for artistic cues to bring his version of the 1811 rebellion to life. He found them, in among other places, the Soviets’ 1920 storming of the Winter Palace (the mass spectacle involved thousands of reenactors and armored vehicles performing for 100,000 spectators); American painter Jacob Lawrence’s depictions of Haitian revolutionaries (as seen in his 1938 painting cycle The Life of Toussaint L’Overture); Cuban conceptualist Tania Bruguera’s arte de conducta or “behavior art” (a 2015 reenactment of her 2009 work Tatlin’s Whisper kicked off a renewed struggle for civil rights in Cuba); and British artist Jeremy Deller’s 2001 film The Battle of Orgreave. A staged re-enactment of a 1984 pitched street battle between union-busting police and striking miners in Yorkshire, Deller’s film—it’s aptly subtitled An Injury to One is an Injury to All—provides much more than a by-the-numbers reenactment. It presents instead a reinterpretation and key corrective to official Thatcherite history.

Like concentration camp Jews during the Nazi Holocaust, slavery-era Blacks in America resisted their imprisonment under the most desperate circumstances. Perhaps this is why Scott insists on a key point about what is, without question, his most ambitious project to date. Slave Rebellion Reenactment is not about slavery, he makes clear, but about self-emancipation. By this Scott means that his reenactment honors America’s own 19th century freedom fighters—among them the revolt’s leader Charles Deslondes, and rebels like Gilbert, Quamana and Marie Rose, all summarily tortured and killed by White militias—as “the people who had the boldest and most radical idea of freedom in the United States 8

“When Jeremy Deller did The Battle of Orgreave,” Scott told one interviewer in 2020, “it wasn’t only to talk about that past but to honor a lot of the miners crushed in 1984 who were on the right side of history.” A way to explore fluid connections between a contested past and an uncertain present, Scott’s elaborate, community-centered production serves as the perfect “What if?” story for our modern Age of Reckoning. An eye-opening narrative for a tumultuous time in which multiple global bills have come due for, among other generational crimes, centuries of environmental degradation, capitalist exploita-

tion, colonialist rule, and 500 plus years of slavery and structural racism, Slave Rebellion Reenactment unapologetically relays history from the standpoint of the oppressed. It also provides what amounts to a surprise ending, at least officially speaking—it didn’t have to be like this.

“People study George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who were enslavers,” Scott has said.

“Why are their ideas of democracy studied, instead of these people who were trying to get to a society that didn’t have slavery at its foundation?” Why indeed? A tough but necessary question that should inform all inquiries into racial justice going forward as well as efforts to push back neoliberal and vintage (read, among others, White evangelism) attempts at historical determinism, its revisionist logic provides the fundamentally radical conceit for Scott’s Slave Rebellion Reenactment— the 2019 performance, the film, the stills, the flags, the costumes, the rectification of history, the opportunities for critical human exchange, and much more.

questioning, are condemned to repeat it. Or as Scott puts it “Reenactment is a question of history: what history is focused on, who tells it, and how that history exists in the present in a new form.” That new form, according to Scott, is a forgotten chapter in U.S. history. One in which enslaved people rebel against the government and win big—210 years later and in a newly enfranchised and liberated present.

Christian Viveros-Fauné Brooklyn, 2021

Opportunities for critical human exchange also remain in the materials and objects attending Scott’s community-based historical project. Large-scale photographs of the 24-mile march—they include images of the rebels’ firing muskets in a field crossed by telephone lines as well the procession’s entry into the French Quarter among parked Hondas and Hyundais—represent history’s irruption into the present, but also the experiential and mnemonic power of embodying history. The same goes for the flags Scott and his army of volunteers stitched and hand-appliqued for their two-day performance.

Imagined versions of what the real-life rebels might have carried, these modern-day relics showcase culturally specific designs that mine African iconography along with the languages with which the revolutionaries proclaimed their revolt (“Morie ou Librite” is Creole for “Live Free or Die”).

To paraphrase Santayana’s 116 year-old formulation: those who are unwilling to reenact the past, at least in their own minds by way of repeated troublesome 9

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Slave Rebellion Reenactment Performance Still 1, 2020. pigment print. 39 3/8 x 59 1/8 inches (100 x 150 cm).

Edition of 2 plus 1 artist’s proof.

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Slave Rebellion Reenactment 2, 2020. pigment print. 39 3/8 x 59 1/8 inches (100 x 150 cm).

Edition of 2 plus 1 artist’s proof.

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The Flags Flags were an important component of the larger performance project. According to a report by the then-US army general, the rebels in 1811 carried flags as they marched into battle; however, there is no recorded description of the banners. The flags that were carried by Scott’s Army of the Enslaved reenactors were specifically designed for the performance and draw upon flags known to have been carried in other slave revolts. They all use materials and techniques that would have been available to enslaved people in Louisiana in the early 1800s.

Scott and collaborators created their flags based on symbols and ideas that might have been inspirational and uniting to people who were enslaved in the region of the rebellion. People would have been Congos from Angola and the West Central African regions around it; Yoruba and Ibo from the Bight of Biafra; Fon from the Bight of Benin; Bambara, Wolof, and Mandingo from the Senegambia and other regions of West Africa as well as those born in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and the United States. There was never a perfect match between speakers of a particular language, polities, and groupings of people; however, the flags created attempt to recognize and respect the complexities of looking at people’s cultural origins on the African continent through the lens of the diaspora.

Scott’s works are imagined flags presumably designed by 19th century people aiming to unite others with substantial differences and visual references. Some utilize linguistic systems that would have been developed and preserved by secret societies.

Collectively they present a complex cultural and linguistic expression of people in diaspora across time. In keeping with the ideals of the larger Slave Rebellion Reenactment project, the flags are simultaneously about the past as well as our present.

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This sword is a representation of the sword of Ogun, a Yoruba and Fon Orisha. Kongolese, Dahomian and Haitian people who would have been present in New Orleans in 1811 could have potentially worshipped Gu/Ogun. Ogun would have also been followed by warriors.

Army of the Enslaved Flag (Ogun), 2019. hand-sewn cotton appliqué. 36 x 54 inches (91.4 x 137.2 cm).

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This flag is indigo-dyed with an Adinkra from Ghana appliquéd in the center. Indigo cultivation and dyeing were skills brought to the United States by enslaved Africans. It is a traditional dyeing technique that produces and unique color and was an important crop in the New Orleans region before enslavers switched to producing sugar.

Adinkras are typically much smaller than the one used on this flag and are generally seen in clothing patterns.

This Adinkra means hope, aspiration and confidence.

Army of the Enslaved Flag (Adinkra), 2019. hand-sewn cotton appliqué. 41 x 52 inches (104.1 x 132.1 cm).

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Slave Rebellion Reenactment Performance Still 3, 2020. pigment print. 39 3/8 x 59 1/8 inches (100 x 150 cm).

Edition of 2 plus 1 artist’s proof.

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Slave Rebellion Reenactment Performance Still 4, 2020. pigment print. 39 3/8 x 59 1/8 inches (100 x 150 cm).

Edition of 2 plus 1 artist’s proof. The West Collection, Philadelphia, PA.

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“The artist must elect to fight for Freedom or for Slavery. I’ve made my choice. I had no alternative.”

—Paul Robeson Like Robeson, visual artist Dread Scott made his choice at the offset of his career—declaring his right to burn an effigy of the US flag on the stairway of the US Capitol and be arrested for the same “art-crime.”

The gallery exhibition precedent for that performance-action—presented in 1989 at the Art Institute of Chicago where Scott was a student—was entitled What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag? The project provoked wrath from President George H. W. Bush, drew mobs of enraged veterans to the gallery door, and incited the US Congress to declare “flag desecration” illegal and sign into law the Flag Protection Act. Scott and four cohorts protested this law with their incendiary response on the Capitol steps; their arrests were appealed to the Supreme Court which decided that any Federal laws regulating flag desecration were illegal.

Kaepernick became unemployable by any team in the NFL. As reaction to Scott’s artful flag-protest actions had proved nearly a quarter century before, reactionary white-American being and nothingness, and indifference to the suffering it imposed on non-white others, was bound up in overwrought and uber-patriotic symbolic fodder.

The insurrection of enslaved Africans Scott chose to honor with his 2019 re-enactment/performance Slave Rebellion Reenactment were those who’d participated in the so-called “German Uprising of 1811.” That rebellion is now understood as the largest uprising of captive Africans under the chattel regime in American history.

The spectacular pageantry of Scott’s historical protest remix was captured on video by acclaimed Black British filmmaker John Akomfrah. Scott’s re-enactment is Much akin to the legendary band leader and radical also a ghost-dance re-animating and celebrating the Black futurist thinker Sun Ra, Scott recognizes that boiling lifeblood and enraged life-energies of those America’s foremost symbols of American freedom are defiant African ancestors across space and time. also historic symbols of violent oppression for BlackThe retribution by the slavers saw Africans torched, folks and other folks of color. People whose histories murdered, decapitated, their heads displayed along with the flag’s most strident bearers have been the city’s levees to terrorize the rest of the enslaved anything but sanguine, encounters with American military force that have in fact been more genocidally Black and Indigenous population. mass exsanguinating for non-white populations In our times, we’ve witnessed slavery readily and here and abroad. easily invoked as kneejerk political metaphor by Sun Ra compels us to recognize that America is less privileged people who dare make analogous to enslavement the least bit of restraint on their selfish a democracy than a mythocracy—one whose sense un-civic behavior—like masking mandates against of a coherent identity is bound by investment in COVID superspreading—or any minor infringement symbolic artifacts imbued with mythic status— on their well-stocked, un-enslaved lives. the flag, the White House, the Capitol, the national anthem, the Pentagon, the US dollar, etc.

In 2016 San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt in protest of rampant contemporary police and prosecutorial abuses of power before a game. Kaepernick was roundly condemned for desecration of not only the NFL but the flag, the national anthem, the military, and the sacrifices of veterans in imperialist US wars. After that season,

The actual experience of slavery by Africans in Constitutional America was a total suspension of not only human rights but their very right to be considered human beings. It was to be considered as much a master’s property and powerless non-human instruments of his will as the shovels, plows and livestock Blackfolks shared ledger space with in the owner’s accounting files.

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Slavery in Louisiana had begun under French colonizers in 1699 and entailed the capture and murder of thousands of Indigenous Chimacho peoples first, and then later enslavement of members of the Atakapa, Bayougala, Natchez, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Taensa and Alabanon societies.

In the “War of the Spanish Succession,” the French obtained thousands of captive Africans who were then sent to Louisiana plantations where the death by disease rates were astronomical for them and fellow enslaved Indigenous folk due to scarce nourishment and unsanitary living conditions.

The Spanish returned in 1768, banning the trade— but not the default enslavement through mandatory and coerced labor—of Indigenous peoples. Enslaved Africans were permitted the right to marry and buy their limited freedom and that of others in their circumscribed plantation communities.

The Louisiana Purchase ceded the territory to the US in 1803. The uprising of 1811 was primarily instigated against inhumane conditions on French and Spanish plantations. Many of the Africans who participated had been brought to the US by French owners fleeing the Haitian revolution. Those African imports obviously brought some of that freedom fighting anti-slavery spirit with them.

Orleans at the locations where this rebellion took place two hundred years prior. We chanted: ‘On to New Orleans! Freedom or death! We’re going to end slavery. Join us!’ It was not so much about the horrors of slavery, as it was about liberatory potential: Africans and people of African descent, were agents of change, fighting to be free from this system of exploitation. These enslaved rebels had the most radical vision of freedom and democracy in the United States—this country’s founding fathers predicated their idea of freedom on owning people.

The notion of ‘we the people,’ as written in the US Constitution, did not include those who worked the fields—and it could not. You can’t tell the history of America without talking about enslavement, and you can’t tell the story of enslavement without discussing slave rebellions. That’s what I wanted to understand, because it has everything to do with our present.’’

Scott’s exhibition at Cristin Tierney Gallery, We’re Going to End Slavery. Join Us!, includes several gorgeous and arresting large-scale photographs of the performance. A number of these depict marchers hand-to-hand battling, besting and in one indelible and poetic wide-shot, firing upon their enemies with their incendiary long barreled muskets.

The exhibition also includes three of the five flags Scott had made for the performance which draw upon poignant, striking and culturally-affirming African symbolic language systems. These speculative banners also move outside the linear timeline to futuristically re-imagine (and re-imagineer) the trans-temporal sweep of our Justice Movement.

Organized Black rebellion against the Spanish had begun as early as the 16th century in Hispaniola.

The 1811 insurrection had been preceded in 1795 in Louisiana by a self-liberated Maroon uprising. That act of fugitive African mass resistance also resulted in a retribution campaign by the slavers and traffickers. About this aspect of one flag Scott writes: “[This flag] uses Nsibidi in the Ejagham language from what is Scott’s re-enactment tacitly, tactically and guerilmodern day southern Nigeria. The image on the left la-theatrically recognizes not only the 1811 action is a symbol that means ‘war & blood’ and was found but the long legacy of organized public militant in Havana, Cuba in 1882. It is intentionally out of time resistance for self-determination within US Black from 1811 and is part of how Slave Rebellion Reenculture—a legacy too often left untold and erased in actment crosses temporal time-lines. The ‘human’ even recent Black-directed cinematic retellings of figure means ‘all this country belongs to me.’ The Black reaction and revolt during the chattel period. middle ‘equal sign’ means unity.’’

About Slave Rebellion Reenactment, Scott says: “[It] looked at how enslaved people in 1811 tried to free Scott’s stated credo, to produce “Revolutionary Art themselves by overthrowing the system of enslaveWhich Propels History Forward,” manifests and resment and setting up an African republic on the ashes onates throughout all the work he’s done since What of New Orleanian society. The history of this radical is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag—the Constivision has been suppressed. I decided to reenact it tutionally transformative, freedom-of-speech expandwith 350 Black and Indigenous people. We marched ing, citizen-liberating, flag-incinerating in period costume with machetes, muskets, sickles, (and flag-stomping) work of his early 20s. and sabers twenty-four miles on the outskirts of New 28

In this focus on art as radical intervention in public political dialogue he joins a small but esteemed list of other contemporary Black visual imagineers who’ve produced undaunted and audacious representations of Blackfolk being loud and proud in taking up armed resistance against white supremacist collusions and delusions. Notable among them are former Black Panther Party Minister of Culture Emory Douglass, graphic novelist Kyle Baker, for his no-holds-barred Nat Turner book, and graphic novelist David F. Walker’s epic work on the Black Panther Party. To this list we should also add the hip hop music and visual projections of Public Enemy and KRS One/ Boogie Down Productions which emerged from the ‘80s anti-racist movement in New York City opposing the many anti-Black murders of the era perpetrated by deputized psychopathic police and deranged citizen lynch mobs.

where ownership and exploitation of forced Black surplus labor could be deployed to produce astronomically more wealth for slavers than could be made by the cotton, cane and tobacco fruits of their labor. The abstracting of enslaved Black bodies into marketable shares built the foundation of much banking, insurance and commercial wealth in today’s US—many of those companies are now Fortune 500 staples. Representing the slavery system’s capacity to treat Black bodies as “fungible’’ led Scott to produce his first NFT for auction by Christie’s and thus draw out the ghoulish paradox of an actual human being’s reduction to NFT status. “The term ‘fungible,’” explains Scott, “resonated differently for me due to its use by scholars of the history of slavery. People are inherently non-fungible. But as slavery became an integral part of developing capitalism, enslavers sought to make people fungible.”

Scott also insists we pay heed to lynching images made by Hale Woodruff, Isamu Noguchi—his anti-lynching sculpture Death—and Diego Rivera.

Woodruff, it should be noted, also did a spectacular series of murals venerating the legendary Amistad slave ship rebellion of 1839 as well as the historic antebellum Connecticut trial which found them defended as free men by Abolitionists (who chose John Quincy Adams as their attorney) and resulted in the repatriation of 35 of those self-liberating Africans— original number 53—to their homeland in Sierra Leone on humanity’s Mother continent.

What Martin Luther King, Jr. cited as the ongoing “thingification’’ of Blackfolk in America begins in the blood-soaked entanglement of slavery and capitalism in the nation’s demonic and Black-dehumanizing née demonizing origin story. This expansion of Scott’s scope from artfully symbolic portrayals of oppression and emancipation to critical exposures of the disguised machinations of the mathematics at play in oppression echoes the revelations of journalist Nikole Hannah Jones’ 1619 Project—especially in how Scott’s NFT piece also deftly unveiled the various masked ways white supremacist intention have been systematically perpetrated through weaponized statistics and algorithmic manipulations.

Clandestine forms of anti-Blackness are woven into areas we least expect them such as software programming, medical research and everyday medical practice—the latter being an area where survival outcomes for hospitalized Blackfolk during the early months of COVID were found to be horrifically disparate and pathologically under-empathized.

Other contemporary work by Scott includes his banner, A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday (an abridged homage to a famous 1930s NAACP antilynching banner flown from Harlem office buildings back in that day). This work was fomented by the police murder of unarmed Walter Scott (North Charleston, 2015) and became widely known in the wake of the police murders of other unarmed Black citizens Alton Sterling (Baton Rouge, 2016) and Philando Castile (Minneapolis, 2016).

During the Black Lives Matters assemblies of 2020, Scott placed signage fabricated in 2001 depicting a silhouetted cop shooting a civilian with both hands up and the words “Danger Police in Area” along a Brooklyn protest route.

In his most recent project, White Male for Sale, Scott takes on the hidden economic trace of slavery which saw the enslaved become tradable commodities on the London and New York Stock Exchanges—places

We eagerly await the next round of works from Scott and the way in which he will surely further calibrate and complicate his anti-racist and anti-capitalist array of human-centered and esthetic resistance strategies and epistemologies. For his fearlessness, outspoken clarity and relentless audacity, Scott continues to be one of the most politically essential creative voices of our time.

Gregory Tate New York, 2021 29

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Indigo-dyed with a wax resist, this flag features a drawing that uses Nsibidi in the Ejagham language from modern-day southern Nigeria.

The image on the left is a symbol that means “war and blood” and was found in Havana, Cuba in 1882. Although dated several decades after the 1811 rebellion, the symbol is part of how Slave Rebellion Reenactment crosses temporal timelines.

The humanoid figure means “all this country belongs to me,” and the equal sign stands in for “unity.”

Army of the Enslaved Flag (Ejagham), 2019. indigo resist-dyed cotton. 42 x 54 inches (106.7 x 137.2 cm).

Edition of 1 plus 1 artist’s proof.

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Slave Rebellion Reenactment Performance Still 5, 2020. pigment print. 39 3/8 x 59 1/8 inches (100 x 150 cm).

Edition of 2 plus 1 artist’s proof.

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Slave Rebellion Reenactment Performance Still 6, 2020. pigment print. 39 3/8 x 59 1/8 inches (100 x 150 cm).

Edition of 2 plus 1 artist’s proof.

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The red double-headed axe on a white field would have been familiar to followers of Shango, a Yoruba Orisha. Warriors would have been attracted to Shango, and red on white are colors that were used to worship Shango. The white is an undyed cotton; the red symbol is appliqué and, like a quilt, is made up of several pieces of slightly different shades of fabric.

Army of the Enslaved Flag (Shango), 2019. hand-sewn cotton appliqué. 36 x 60 inches (91.4 x 152.4 cm).

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The words on this flag are Louisiana Creole; in English, it states, “Death or Liberty.” This phrase has appeared on flags in multiple slave rebellions.

Army of the Enslaved Flag (Librite), 2019. hand-painted cotton. 36 x 60 inches (91.4 x 152.4 cm).

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Dread Scott (b. 1965, Chicago, IL) is an interdisciplinary artist who for three decades has made work that encourages viewers to re-examine cohering ideals of American society. In 1989, the US Senate outlawed his artwork and President Bush declared it “disgraceful” because of its transgressive use of the American flag.

Dread became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others burned flags on the steps of the Capitol. He has presented a TED talk on this subject.

His art has been exhibited at MoMA/PS1, The Walker Art Center, and street corners across the country. He is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow and the 2019 Open Society Foundations Soros Equality Fellow and has received fellowships from United States Artists and Creative Capital Foundation. His art is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum.

His studio is in Brooklyn, New York.

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Photography credits: Soul Brother – cover, 2, 11, 13, 23, 25, 35, 37 Elisabeth Bernstein – 4-5, 18-19, 32-33, 42-23

Cristin Tierney Gallery 219 Bowery, Floor 2 New York, NY 10002 212.594.0550 www.cristintierney.com