On The Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide

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On The Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide

Dread Scott's performance, On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide, delved into America's legacy of racism. Held beneath the Manhattan Bridge Archway, it referenced historical struggles like the 1963 Civil Rights Movement. Scott's symbolic act of facing a water hose highlighted ongoing socio-cultural issues and the fight against discrimination.

Artist

Dread Scott

When

One time performance, October 7, 2014.

Where

Manhattan Bridge Archway Plaza, DUMBO, Brooklyn.

Dread Scott, On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide, 2014. © Mark Von Holden / Mark Von Holden Photography

Project description
About the artist

Dread Scott, On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide, 2014. © Mark Von Holden / Mark Von Holden Photography

On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide was a performance piece by artist Dread Scott engaging with the legacy of racism in the United States and pointing to the continuing struggles faced by minorities across the nation.

The Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide took place underneath the Manhattan Bridge Archway, located at Water Street between Anchorage Place and Adams Street in DUMBO, for one time only on Tuesday, October 7, 2014 at 1pm in the afternoon.

The performance, in part, referenced the 1963 Civil Rights struggle in Birmingham Alabama, during which city officials used high-pressure water canons to disperse non-violent protesters and bystanders in an effort to maintain segregation and legalized discrimination. On the Impossibility of Freedom featured Dread Scott engaged in a Sisyphean attempt to walk into the battering force of water jetting from a fire hose. While the performance was highly reminiscent of crowd control tactics used in the past, it also served as a statement on a myriad of socio-cultural issues that affect a diverse group of marginalized individuals through discriminatory policies in immigration, criminal justice, welfare and education. This piece also reflected on present-day struggles against racism and the struggle for equality, as those demonstrated by the protests and then the militarized police response in Ferguson, Missouri.

“On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide is a performance about the struggle for freedom,” said Scott. “People yearn for freedom and have repeatedly struggled against oppressive governments, economic, political and social relations. People have taken great risks in a fight for emancipation and have often been battered in the process.”

Partner and Supporter

Dread Scott

Dread Scott is a visual artist whose works is exhibited across the US and internationally. In 1989, his art became the center of national controversy over its transgressive use of the American flag, while he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. President G.H.W. Bush called his art “disgraceful” and the entire US Senate denounced and outlawed this work. Dread became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others defied the federal law outlawing his art by burning flags on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. He has presented at TED talk on this.

His work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, the Walker Art Center, Cristin Tierney Gallery, and Gallery MOMO in Cape Town, South Africa, and is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, The National Gallery of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. He was a 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and has also received fellowships from Open Society Foundations and United States Artists as well as a Creative Capital grant.

In 2019 he presented Slave Rebellion Reenactment, a community-engaged project that reenacted the largest rebellion of enslaved people in US history. The project was featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Christiane Amanpour on CNN, and highlighted by artnet.com as one of the most important artworks of the decade.

Dread Scott, On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide, 2014. © Mark Von Holden / Mark Von Holden Photography

Dread Scott, On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide, 2014. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Photo by Hrag Vartanian

Education

In attendance at Dread Scott’s performance was a group of over 200 high-school students from Gotham Professional Arts Academy in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a historically African-American neighborhood in Brooklyn. Over the course of the following weeks, the students organized a series of town hall meetings to address recent national and personal instances of racial tension and social injustice. Several students submitted written responses and reflections to post on More Art’s website, which you will find below.

Art Education