AAPC
Dread Scott
All African People’s Consulate
PREVIEW APRIL 17-19; PUBLIC OPENING APRIL 20
GRAND CANAL AT CASTELLO GALLERY
For the 2024 Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, Wake Forest University’s Director of Art Galleries and Programming Paul Bright is collaborating with acclaimed artist Dread Scott to curate All African People’s Consulate as an official Collateral Event.
The All African People’s Consulate (AAPC) is a conceptual artwork consisting of a functioning consulate for an imaginary Pan-African, Afrofuturist union of countries, promoting cultural and diplomatic relations. In the Consulate visitors can apply for an All African People’s Community passport or visa. They will be invited to interview with Consulate staff, where they will discuss their relationship to Africa, their family history of migration, and more. For those of African descent, the Consulate facilitates their citizenship in this futurist, globalist community, presenting them with a personalized passport. Others will receive a visa allowing them to visit.
Dread Scott’s AAPC is typical of the artist’s work in that it will deftly reverse a situation that we think we know or are familiar with in order to change our fundamental perceptions. The premise of the All African People’s Consulate is the opposite of most existing diplomatic and immigration choke-points; while those often function to constrain your admittance and movement in an effort to keep you out, this Consulate facilitates ways to let you in. In a convivial, celebratory setting, you are invited to stay, converse, and interact in organic, spontaneous ways. It is an incubator for connection, community, and visionary revolution.
Dread Scott is represented by Cristin Tierney Gallery, (NYC), which is headed by Wake Forest alum and arts supporter Cristin Tierney. Dread Scott’s AAPC is being supported by the Open Society Foundations and The Africa Center (NYC), and by Wake Forest University.
Following the Biennale, in the fall of 2025, Bright, in collaboration with Cristin Tierney Gallery and Dread Scott, will present a survey of the artist’s work at the Hanes Art Gallery.
Cristin Tierney has partnered with WFU’s Hanes Art Gallery periodically since 2013, and brought peter campus: video ergo sum to the gallery in 2019 as a major traveling retrospective, organized by the Jeu de Paume in Paris and shared in NC with SECCA and Reynolda House Museum of American Art. In 2017 Hanes Gallery and Cristin Tierney Gallery collaborated on the Bright-curated and Venice Biennale-adjacent 2017 project and subsequent Hanes Gallery exhibition, Tim Youd: Moveable Type. Cristin Tierney has assisted organizing the NYC component of the WFU course Management in the Visual Arts for many years, and has gifted works to WFU Art Collections, including those by Eve Sussman and Dread Scott.
Paul Bright has been Director of Hanes Gallery since 2012, and has organized or curated more than 17 exhibitions and performances in Italy since 2006, of his own and others’ works, including five originating with Hanes Gallery.
Dread Scott (b. 1965, Chicago, IL) is an interdisciplinary artist who for three decades has made work that encourages viewers to re-examine the cohering ideals of American society. He works in a range of media from performance and photography to screen-printing and video.
In 1989, the US Senate outlawed his artwork and President Bush declared it “disgraceful” because of its transgressive use of the American flag. Called What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, the interactive installation was comprised of a photomontage with pictures of South Korean students burning US flags and flag-draped coffins in a troop transport; books (originally with blank pages) on a shelf; ink pens; a 3’x5′ American flag on the ground; and an active audience. The audience was encouraged to write responses to the question “What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?” in the book, and as they did so they could choose to stand on the flag. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibition of the work generated intense controversy and national media coverage. In response to Congress’s decision to make flag desecration illegal, Scott and others burned flags on the steps of the Capitol, becoming part of a landmark Supreme Court case. In 2018, Scott presented a TED talk on this subject.
His art has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, The Walker Art Center, Brooklyn Museum, CAM St. Louis, Whitney Museum of American Art, African American Museum, Bruce Museum, CAM Houston, Worcester Art Museum, Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute, Studio Museum in Harlem, Weserburg Museum für Moderne Kunst, OK Center for Contemporary Art (Linz), and Kunsthal KAdE, among others. It is included in the collections of the National Gallery (Washington, DC), New Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Montclair Art Museum, Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute, Ackland Art Museum at University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, Akron Art Museum, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and Worcester Art Museum.
In 2019 Scott presented Slave Rebellion Reenactment, a community engaged project that reenacted the largest rebellion of enslaved people in US history. Over two days hundreds of Black and indigenous reenactors in period attire retraced the 24-mile path of the German Coast Uprising of 1811, carrying flags and weapons and singing in Creole and English to African drumming. The procession was startlingly incongruous as they advanced past modern-day neighborhoods, strip malls, and oil refineries. This anomaly opened a space for people to rethink long held assumptions about US history. The project was featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, by Christiane Amanpour on CNN, and highlighted by Artnet as one of the most important artworks of the decade. Other works by Scott have been featured on the covers of Artforum and The Brooklyn Rail, and on the front page of NYTimes.com. In December 2021, ARTnews named his NFT White Male for Sale one of the defining artworks of the year.
He was recently awarded the 2023-24 Rome Prize in Visual Arts by the American Academy in Rome, and previously received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Frieze Impact Prize, Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Open Society Foundations Soros Equality Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, and Creative Capital Foundation Fellowship. His studio is in Brooklyn, New York.