Your piece "A Man Was Lynched By Police Yesterday" got a lot of attention after it went up outside the Jack Shainman Gallery. Could you tell me about its genesis and significance to you?

It was made in 2015, after the police killing of Walter Scott in South Carolina. I'd been thinking a lot about police repression, police brutality, mass incarceration, and how the police are just getting away with murder after murder after murder. I made some work about that [in the past] but this was something that I felt required a new sort of response. The piece is an update of an NAACP banner that flew in the 1920s and ‘30s out front of their New York headquarters. They were trying to organize an anti-lynching campaign to stop the scourge of lynching, which, from the 1860s, was terrorizing the black community. Most black people weren't lynched, but every black person knew that they could be lynched for any reason or no reason whatsoever.

ADVERTISEMENT

Seeing how the police have been caught time and time again — now on cell phone video — just murdering people and getting away with it, I felt that it would be appropriate to talk about how this scourge from the past is sort of existing in the present in a new form. The police have actually, across the country, been killing people at probably five to six times the rate that people were lynched at the height of lynching in the decade between 1885 and 1894. And it's disproportionately black and Latino people: you’re anywhere between four to seven times as likely to get killed by the police if you're black, as to if you're white.

So there’s this symmetry of the past stalking people in the present, but also of building resistance. One of the things that the NAACP was doing with their flag was not just marking a horror but actually trying to organize people to stop it. While they were, and are, a civil rights organization, I'm an artist and this piece is being shown in largely an art context. But it actually is, I think, resonating far beyond an art venue in getting out to society; it is still putting the ideas out there at a moment where people are in the street and disrupting society and disrupting traffic and demanding to be treated like human beings. It is part of [a broader] resistance which is urgently needed to stop the police from killing people, again and again and again and again.

What do you think it is about invoking language like “lynching” that is particularly resonant?

ADVERTISEMENT

The thing is [that] people think of lynching as something that's from a barbaric past. Again, most black people are not being hung from trees or set on fire in front of crowds. But if the mayor of New York has a black child, which he does, and has to have a conversation with him about how to survive an encounter with the police, that tells you how pervasive the threat is. People don’t spontaneously think, "Oh, the cops are lynchers." But if the mayor of the most significant, major metropolitan city in the country has to have that talk with his son and he can't protect his son, what can ordinary people do? What can the Freddie Grays of the world and the Walter Scotts of the world do? What can the Tamir Rices of the world and their parents do to protect them? [Police killings] are different than lynching but they play the same role in terms of terrorizing a community.

I thought the language of the piece was both strong but absolutely appropriate, and I challenge anybody to say that's actually not the case. How is it that the police are actually different from the lynch mob? How is it that they're different when they get literally caught on film, where there are eyewitnesses to the crime, where there's video evidence of the crime, and yet, much like the ‘20s and ‘30s 40s and ‘50s and ‘60s, that counts for nothing? When Emmett Till was lynched, everybody knew in that courtroom who the lynchers were. And it was extremely rare that lynchers were prosecuted or brought to trial. And in that case, the judge greeted the African-American community that came to the courtroom by saying, "Hello, niggers!” There was photograph after photograph after photograph of lynch mobs, yet they were never tried, never prosecuted, never convicted. This situation exists today. We all saw five cops choke Eric Garner to death. We saw that video; not one of them faced prosecution. We saw video of Tamir Rice getting shot; there was no indictment. We saw Freddie Gray encounter the police, perfectly healthy, and then a week later, dead; the only people who encountered him in [that time] were the police. There were three trials, all of them would end in acquittal. Cops don't go to jail for murder.