Dread Scott Art for Sale at Auction

b. 1965 -

Dread Scott is a photographer, performance artist, and provocateur. His work derives from a passion to uncover injustices as well as the subjugation of men and women made invisible by society. His work also highlights the historical struggles toward justice and equality. The photographs and sign in the work, I Am Not a Man, derive from a 2009 performance in which Scott walked the streets of Harlem in symbolic protest. The familiar but crucially altered protest sign he carried recalls those pictured in the iconic photo of the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike, a major civil rights-movement protest that sought equal treatment and safer working conditions for some 1,300 black sanitation workers.

Scott’s appropriation of the famous sign and his addition of the word “not” to its message both pay homage to civil rights–era struggles and point to the limitations of those efforts. Intentionally stumbling and losing his pants, Scott punctuated the hour-long walk with humiliating moments that called attention to the persistence of racism in contemporary American society. Eliciting a spectrum of reactions from passersby, I Am Not a Man foregrounds the role of audience in activist performance art.


Dread Scott received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989. He completed the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in 1993.