Dread Scott on art and rebellion

I WISH THE WORK WEREN’T RELEVANT ANYMORE. I posted something to Instagram this morning, a print I did in 2001. It was a picture of Hattie McDaniel in her Gone with the Wind costume, overlaid with the words IF WHITE PEOPLE DIDN’T INVENT AIR, WHAT WOULD WE BREATHE? I like the work, and obviously, at thirty-five, I didn’t think racism would end in five years. But I didn’t necessarily imagine, when I made A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday in 2015, that in 2020 we would be watching videotaped images of police lynchings again and again and again. When I look back to a work like The Blue Wall of Violence—a 1999 installation about police brutality and murder—I realize I’m ready to do flower paintings. I’m joking, but still: We shouldn’t need to spend so much time and energy making work about how the police enforce relations of exploitation and oppression and specifically white supremacy. At this point, I’d really rather be making work about something else.