Still from Dread Scott's "On the Impossibility of a Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide," 2014. Performance, 23 minutes.Interdisciplinary artist Dread Scott will give a visiting artist lecture at the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts on Wednesday, Sept. 11.
The 6 p.m. lecture, free and open to the public, is presented by the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Art and Art History, Space One Eleven, and UAB’s AEIVA, located at 1221 10th Ave. South.
For three decades, Scott has made work that encourages viewers to re-examine cohering ideals of American society. In 1989, the entire United States Senate denounced and outlawed his artwork and President George H. Bush declared it “disgraceful” because of its use of the American flag. His art has been exhibited/performed at MoMA/PS1, The Walker Art Center, Pori Art Museum in Finland, BAM (Brooklyn), and galleries and street corners across the country. He is a recipient of a 2018 United States Artists Fellowship award and multiple grants from the Creative Capital Foundation and the Open Society Institute. Scott’s work is exhibited across the United States and internationally, and is included in the collection of the Whitney Museum.
According to his artist’s statement, Scott says, “I make revolutionary art to propel history forward. I look towards an era without exploitation or oppression.” Scott works in a range of media, including performance, installation, video, photography, printmaking and painting. “Two threads that connect them are: an engagement with significant social questions and a desire to push formal and conceptual boundaries as part of contributing to artistic development,” Scott wrote.