Lynching Exhibit in Baltimore
After Walter Scott was gunned down by an officer in South Carolina, a Baltimore artist by the name of Loring Cornish decided to use art to make a powerful (and uncomfortable) statement about police brutality. Outside his studio he hung a large collection of black dolls from a tree to represent the modern-day lynchings of Black citizens due to police brutality. “I am mourning for all of the Black men that are dying needlessly, and the United States of America is doing nothing about it,” he told reporters about his exhibit. “And it seems like we can do nothing about police brutality.”
‘On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide’
In 2014, artist Dread Scott, the same artist behind “The Blue Wall of Violence,” unveiled a type of performance art that had people cringing at the realities of racism and abuse in America. Scott, a healthy and athletic Black man, attempted to walk against the powerful blow of water coming from a high-pressure fire hose — the same type of powerful blast used against Black men, women and children during the Civil Rights Movement. Spectators watched as Scott was repeatedly knocked to the ground and thrown back as if he was nothing more than a piece of trash. Scott told reporters that he hoped the display would force more people to “connect police brutality in Birmingham, Alabama 1963 to police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri 2014.”
