Brian Palmer:

Scott sees the slave rebellion reenactment as part of a life's work that seeks to ask hard questions about America's past and present.

He drew national attention —and heavy criticism — in 1989 for an art installation he called "What is the proper way to display a U.S. flag?" Visitors could step on an American flag while interacting with the art.

In 2015, he made headlines for an adaptation of a famous anti-lynching banner that hung from the New York office of the NAACP in 1936.

In Scott's updated version the flags' original words "a man was lynched yesterday" were replaced with "a man was lynched by police yesterday" equating police brutality with lynching. It's an extension of the argument made by many contemporary scholars—and the Black Lives Matter movement—that not only present day police killings, but also mass incarceration grow out of a long history of over policing black people.