Outrage and Controversy at NY Museum Art Show Depicting Police Brutality

"Taxpayer dollars certainly should not fund any art that promotes hate, and that's certainly what [Dread Scott's, Blue Wall of Violence] does." Patrick Lynch, president, NYC Patrolmen's Benevolent Association

My exhibition Dread Scott: Welcome to America opened on February 28 at MoCADA (the Museum of Contemporary African Disporan Art) in Brooklyn, NY. It is a survey of my art spanning almost two decades. The show was instantly vilified in the NY Daily News and the police union called for the city and state to defund the museum because of one of the works. Specifically, they denounced "The Blue Wall of Violence." In its Feb. 29 article bearing the headline "Finest: Dis Art is the Worst!" the News wrote: "A cop-bashing art exhibit at a taxpayer-funded museum in Brooklyn portrays the city's Finest as trigger-happy racists who have put bull's-eyes on the backs of black New Yorkers."

"The Blue Wall of Violence" is a 1999 installation that addresses police brutality. It focuses on the object that the police "mistook" for a dangerous weapon when they shot an unarmed person. The artwork consists of several elements: On the wall are six actual FBI silhouette targets which police use for shooting practice. Protruding from each of these is a cast of an arm. In each hand is an object -- wallet, house keys, 3 Musketeers bar, squeegee, etc. Above each target is a date. In front of this is a coffin and in front of the coffin are three police batons which are moved by motors so that they each strike the casket every 10 seconds with a loud penetrating bang. The dates correspond to a day when an actual person was shot by the police and the objects are what they were holding when shot (For example, on February 4, 1999 Amadou Dialo was shot 41 times while holding his wallet, on Sept 24, 1994, 13-year-old Nicholas Hayward Jr. was killed while holding a brightly colored oversized water pistol ...)

In many of my artworks, I use common objects that have a particular resonance from everyday life. In this case, targets, coffins and billy clubs are combined and people can see something new about them. In another work in the exhibit I have a Black baby doll floating in an aquarium and place a trumpet at the bottom -- all in reference to Hurricane Katrina. My works tend to have a horrible beauty and that tension is what I think contributes to their power.

This work stylizes these six targets and a coffin to point to the tip of a much larger iceberg. When I made the piece in at the end of the 90s the police and law enforcement had killed over 2,000 people that decade. And this statistic has rapidly increased in the past 8 years.

The news story that has developed has focused on one artwork. What is overshadowed in all of this is that "The Blue Wall of Violence" is part of a larger exhibition that explores many themes. It includes work about people left to suffer and die in Katrina, people killed by the U.S. war on Afghanistan, brutality against Muslims while in detention after 9-11 and photographs and audio interviews with some of the 2.4 million prisoners in the U.S.

Police brutality in the U.S. is part of this larger picture. In considering what work would be included in the exhibition, I thought about what would enable my audience to think about some particular theme or subject addressed by individual works as well as to be able to muse about broader relationships. For example what is the relation between a Guinean immigrant being drawn to America and later killed by the police in the doorway to his Bronx apartment and children killed by U.S. bombs in Afghanistan?

A couple of people who visited the exhibit recently noted that I say, "I make revolutionary art to propel history forward" and wanted to know more about what I meant by that. The conversation touched on a range of things, but one thing I pointed out was that the world is a horror for billions of people. Many of the works in this exhibit highlight what this means for Black people and reveal how this society literally kills us.