The horrific instances of racially charged violence that have erupted over the last two weeks have given new significance to existing artworks. Last week Dread Scott installed an updated version of the flag that read “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday” and hung outside the NAACP building in New York on Fifth Avenue from 1936 to 1938. Dread’s A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday was created in response to the 2015 killing of Walter Scott, and was made a last-minute addition to the current show at Jack Shainman Gallery after news that Alton Sterling and Philando Castile had become the latest black men to be killed by police. Now another powerful work is getting a second wind courtesy of Yoko Ono, who has donated a new version of her 2001 Imagine Peace banner to the Dallas Museum of Art in response to five police officers being killed in the Texas city las Thursday. The updated black-and-white banner reads “Imagine Peace Forever” in both English and Spanish, and will be on show at Ross Avenue Plaza through August 22.
“Its basic black and white palette promotes positive change, connecting with its viewers directly in a call for peace on many levels: in your own being, in your relationships, in the city, and globally,” the museum says on its website. “The Dallas Museum of Art hopes to inspire individual empowerment, as Ono profoundly believes we all have the power to create positive difference in the world.” Ono created the original banner to evoke John Lennon’s 1971 song “Imagine,” a radical message of harmony which was originally inspired by Ono’s own poems.
Credits
Text Hannah Ongley
Photo courtesy creative commons