RISD's Graduate Speaker Series continues with The Gradual Contemporary: Conversations on Contemporary Art. Please join us for artist Dread Scott's talk Imagine a World without America. Reception beforehand at 5:30 pm in the Chace Lobby.

Dread Scott makes revolutionary art to propel history forward. He doesn’t accept the economic foundation, social relations and governing ideas of America. His work encourages an audience to explore important questions based upon this perspective. The talk will look at a sampling of his art from the past 30 years. Scott works in a range of media including performance, photography, screen printing, installation and video. The works look at themes including:

• American identity and patriotism
• American democracy's roots in slavery and how that sets the stage for our present.
• The criminalization of Black and Latino youth
• The continuum connecting the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s to contemporary Black Lives Matter resistance to murder by police
• Imagining a world free of oppression and exploitation

The event is co-hosted by RISD's Center for Social Equity and Inclusion (SEI) and the Department of Theory + History of Art + Design (THAD).

Dread Scott is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is exhibited across the US and internationally. For three decades he has made work that encourages viewers to re-examine cohering ideals of American society. In 1989, the entire US Senate denounced and outlawed his artwork and President Bush declared it “disgraceful” because of its use of the American flag. His art has been exhibited/performed at MoMA/PS1, Pori Art Museum (Finland), BAM (Brooklyn) and galleries and street corners across the country. He is a recipient of a 2018 United States Artists Fellowship and grants from the Creative Capital Foundation and the Open Society Institute. His work is included in the collection of the Whitney Museum.