DREAD SCOTT: THE POWER OF RESISTANCE Curated by Anna Mecugni

Political, radical, incendiary—such has been Dread Scott’s artistic practice for the past thirty years, with works that bridge art and activism by intimately connecting the visual with the social. Through mediums ranging from street performance to video, photography, and printmaking, Dread Scott confronts injustices head-on, raising the urgent question of social responsibility. 

Curated by UNO Assistant Professor of Art History Anna Mecugni, The Power of Resistance brings together a selection of prints and video works from the past fifteen years. It features posters from the ongoing Statements series, begun in 2018, and videos including Welcome to America (2004), Money to Burn (2010), and Stop (2012), which denounce the underlying racism, xenophobia, and downright absurdity of common, legal practices in today’s profit-driven, de-humanizing capitalist societies. 

With this exhibition the UNO St. Claude Gallery pays tribute to the artist and his six-year-long, large-scale, community-engaged project Slave Rebellion Reenactment, about to culminate, on November 8–9, in a two-day reenactment of the 1811 Louisiana uprising, the largest rebellion of enslaved people in the history of the United States. 

ARTIST BIO

Dread Scott (b. 1965) “makes revolutionary art to propel history forward,” as he contends. Currently based in Brooklyn, he first made national headlines in 1989 with the participatory work What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag? (1988), which launched his career as a master provocateur; President G.H.W. Bush deemed the work “disgraceful” and the U.S. Senate outlawed it. 

Dread Scott’s work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York; it has been featured in exhibitions across the U.S. and internationally, at institutions such as New York’s MoMA PS1, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Gallery MOMO in Cape Town, South Africa. His performances have been presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and on the streets of New York City. Dread Scott is a recipient of a 2018 United States Artists Fellowship and grants from the Creative Capital Foundation and the Open Society Institute. 

CURATOR BIO

Anna Mecugni (b. 1974) is an art historian and curator from Italy who joined the University of New Orleans in 2018 to lead the art history program. Her research and teaching interests have focused on tableau vivant and reenactment, as well as activism and social justice in the arts. She has worked between academia and the curatorial world, holding positions at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Venice Biennale, Vassar College, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

VENUE ADDRESS

2429 St. Claude Avenue — New Orleans, LA 70117