This Week in New York Insider's Guide to Arts & Culture in New York City Since 2001

ARTISTS ON ARTWORKS — DREAD SCOTT ON JACOB LAWRENCE

Jacob Lawrence, We have no property! We have no wives! No children! We have no city! No country! — petition of many slaves, 1773, 1955 (Collection of Harvey and Harvey-Ann Ross. © 2019 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York)

Who: Dread Scott, Sylvia Yount
What: Artist talk
Where: Met Museum Facebook or YouTube
When: Friday, October 23, free, 6:30 (exhibition continues through November 1)
Why: In his artist statement, Dread Scott explains, “I make revolutionary art to propel history forward. I look towards an era without exploitation or oppression. I don’t accept the political structures, economic foundation, social relations, and governing ideas of America. . . . I work in a range of media: performance, installation, video, photography, printmaking, and painting. Two threads that connect them are: an engagement with significant social questions and a desire to push formal and conceptual boundaries as part of contributing to artistic development.” On October 23 at 6:30, the Met will be livestreaming the prerecorded program “Artists on Artwork — Dread Scott on Jacob Lawrence,” in which Dread looks at his own work and puts it in context with that of Lawrence, focusing on the intensely beautiful “American Struggle,” on view at the Met through November 1. The show features Lawrence’s extraordinary “Struggle: From the History of the American People,” a mid-1950s series consisting of thirty historical twelve-by-sixteen-inch tempera paintings that trace US history from 1775 to 1817, depicting, in Lawrence’s words, “the struggles of a people to create a nation and their attempt to build a democracy.”

The Met has twenty-five of the thirty original canvases on display (the other five are represented by black-and-white facsimiles), organized in chronological order, reminiscent of Lawrence’s more famous 1940-41 “The Great Migration.” Like that series, “Struggle” engages with social questions — many of which are still relevant today — while pushing formal and conceptual boundaries. [Ed. note: On October 22, it was announced that one of the missing paintings, There are combustibles in every State, which a spark might set fire to. — Washington, 26 December 1786, depicting Shays’ Rebellion, has been found and will be reunited with the rest of the series at the Met.] Colors explode off the panels, which favor sharp angles and striking imagery melding representation and abstraction that often requires rapt concentration to decipher, coming to life slowly before your eyes. Lawrence used descriptive titles often taken from published quotations to name the pieces. In We crossed the River at McKonkey’s Ferry 9 miles above Trenton . . . the night was excessively severe . . . which the men bore without the least murmur (Tench Tilghman, December 27, 1776), bayonets point up to the sky as Gen. George Washington leads three rowboats over the ocean, being carried by treacherous blue waves. In . . . we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honour, words taken from the conclusion of the Declaration of Independence, a man is barely visible through the wagon of hay he is pulling while blood drips down the right side of the painting. And Lawrence celebrates military veteran Margaret Cochran Corbin at the Battle of Fort Washington in And a Woman Mans a Cannon, with sharp horizontals offset by a tall, vertical figure at left.

Dread Scott’s Slave Rebellion Reenactment was performed last November 8-9 in the outskirts of New Orleans (photo by Soul Brother)

In a 1968 interview with Carroll Greene for the Archives of American Art, Lawrence said about the work, “Several years ago I started an American history series, which did not pertain strictly to the Negro theme but I think my reason for doing it had something with the Negro consciousness. I wanted to show how the Negro had participated — and to what degree the Negro had participated — in American history. In fact I call it the ‘Struggle.’ As late as a few years ago in the 1950s, the Negro had not been included in the general stream of American history. We don’t know the story, how historians have glossed over the Negro’s part as one of the builders of America, how he tilled the fields and picked cotton and helped to build the cities. But I wanted to do a series showing the American Revolution. Again, this had to do with struggle — the struggle of man. This was not a Negro series; it isn’t just Negroes. It dealt with Negroes who were with Washington when he crossed the Delaware. Not as slaves. These were people who had signed up to take part in the American Revolution.” For more on Lawrence, check out a short 1993 video portrait here; born in Atlantic City and raised in Harlem, he passed away in 2000 at the age of eighty-two.

Dread’s work includes the 2019 performance piece Slave Rebellion Reenactment, a timely exploration of suppression, resistance, and revolution; the controversial What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?; and Money to Burn, in which he burned cash on Wall Street. Right now he has a billboard on Morgan Ave. and Harrison St. in Brooklyn in the group show “Ministry of Truth 1984/2020,” declaring, “9-1-1. There’s a white male running down the street.” For more on Dread Scott, watch this interview from April. The MetSpeaks talk is moderated by Sylvia Yount, the Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of the American Wing. And don’t forget to see the Lawrence show, which is utterly stunning and closes soon.