On 6 February, the University of Maryland’s David C. Driskell Center for the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora opened America Will Be (until 8 May), an exhibition showcasing how Black artists have “harness[ed] the power of the US flag”. According to the artist Dread Scott, however, there is a significant omission.
Last February, Scott says he was “thrilled” to receive a loan request from the Driskell Center’s director, Jordana Moore Saggesse, for his work What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag? (1988). In her letter, Saggesse noted that the work was “central to the history of how Black artists have contested the power of this object”.
But after later rescinding the loan request and proposing an alternative work or an archival display about What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag?, Saggesse and her co-curator on America Will Be!, Nicole Archer, ultimately informed Scott in January that his work could not be included in the exhibition at all “due to logistical constraints”, suggesting a future book project instead.
For Scott, whose interdisciplinary practice challenges assumptions about the United States and its history, the exclusion of his work from the Driskell Center exhibition is down to “anticipatory censorship”, as opposed to the issues outlined in his correspondence with the curators. He tells The Art Newspaper: “It’s the first time I’ve been censored in a show three times.”
What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag? caused a national outcry when it was first exhibited at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989. The participatory installation features an American flag laid out on the floor, along with a photomontage on the wall of images of the flag on military coffins and of South Korean protestors burning the flag. Between these two objects is a shelf with a ledger, inviting visitors to answer the titular question, though to do so participants must step on the flag.
