There are practical ways in which my work gets taken up by a movement. Images of A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday and Sign of the Times [2001] have been printed on T-shirts and shared on Twitter and Instagram—and that’s great. But, more importantly, my work connects America’s past to our present.
Suite, Malcolm [2020] was a decentralized social media performance that occurred during the pandemic lockdown, as Covid-19 was disproportionately affecting the Black community. I asked participants to research why Black people were unequally impacted and then to make short videos reading part of Malcolm X’s speech “The Ballot or the Bullet,” in which he says, “I’m not a Republican, nor a Democrat, nor an American, and I’ve got sense enough to know it. I’m one of the 22 million Black victims of the Democrats, one of the 22 million victims of the Republicans, and one of the 22 million Black victims of Americanism.”
