Dread Scott: Distinguished Alumni Lecture

Dread Scott, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, performance still 1, 2020, pigment print, 100 cm x 150 cm. © Dread Scott. Photo: Soul Brother

Join us for a lecture by artist Dread Scott followed by an audience Q & A. 

Doors open at 5:45 p.m. Free and open to the public. Registration is not required. Explore the Visiting Artists Program homepage for visitor information, recordings of past events, and more.

Dread Scott (BFA 1989) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work encourages viewers to reexamine cohering ideals of American society. In 1989, the US Senate outlawed his artwork and President Bush declared it "disgraceful" because of its transgressive use of the American flag. Scott became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others burned flags on the steps of the Capitol. He has presented a TED talk on this subject.

His artwork, the All African People’s Consulate (2024), was an official Collateral Event of the 60th International Venice Biennial. His art has been exhibited at MoMA/PS1, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands; and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York. It is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum, National Gallery of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Weatherspoon Art Museum. In 2019, he presented Slave Rebellion Reenactment, a community engaged project that reenacted the largest rebellion of enslaved people in US history. The project was featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and by Christiane Amanpour on CNN. Artforum has featured his work on its cover.

In 2023, Scott received the Abigail Cohen Rome Prize. Two years earlier, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Frieze Impact Prize, and a Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. That year he was named a senior fellow at the Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College. He was the 2019 Open Society Foundations Soros Equality Fellow, and he has received fellowships from United States Artists and the Creative Capital Foundation.

Presented in partnership with SAIC Alumni Engagement.

This event will be live captioned by Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) services. The auditorium is wheelchair accessible and hearing assisted devices are available. For additional access requests, visit saic.edu/access.