Dread Scott
Scott Tyler, known professionally as Dread Scott, is an American artist whose works, often participatory in nature, focus on the experience of African Americans in the contemporary United States.
Photographed at Nicholas Naquan Heyward Jr. Park in Brooklyn
When Dread Scott was 23 and still a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, his installation What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag—which allowed audiences to step on the Stars and Stripes—prompted Congress to pass the Flag Protection Act of 1989. President George H. W. Bush declared the piece “disgraceful.” Scott was encouraged.
A former punk-rock kid from Chicago who inscribed the country’s foundational sin in his chosen name (a reference to the 1857 Supreme Court decision that upheld slavery), Scott repurposes American iconography into indictments of racism. He highlights the past’s hold on the present, perhaps no more succinctly than in the piece I Am Not a Man.
The sandwich board, which Scott wore on the streets of Harlem, is a near replica of one used in the Memphis sanitation-workers strike of 1968. With one addition: the word not. “The performance,” Scott has said, “evoked the humiliation that is visited on black people and the negation that defines our existence.” —GF