“The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam,” Nina Simone announced during her 1964 concert at Carnegie Hall. “And I mean every word of it.” A response to the assassination of Medgar Evers and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in which four little girls were killed, events which had occurred the previous year, Simone’s expression of grief, frustration, and anger became an anthem of the ongoing Civil Rights Movement; its debut marked a sharp turn towards the political in the singer’s career. Nearly sixty years later, artist Dread Scott links Simone’s songs of protest to the present-day, creating four large screen-prints on canvas in which contemporary images acknowledge the continuation of hatred and violence directed towards Black Americans, women, and LGBTQ+ communities.
Goddam (2021), the exhibition’s titular work, centers a photograph of the US Capitol Building on a silver ground over which maps of Texas, Minnesota, Florida, and Georgia—hotbeds of brutality and murder—have been printed in yellow, black, and blue. The word “Goddam!,” written in red letters in what looks like the artist’s hand, repeats over the picture five times. Straightforward and immediate, the work echoes the distress of Simone’s lyric, acknowledging the futility of national demonstrations in a country whose legislative policy continues to marginalize its Black citizens. The central image speaks to the the US government’s blatant disregard for human safety and dignity as well as the current administration’s inability to stem the ongoing murders of innocent Black Americans despite the Black Lives Matter movement and years of organized protests.
