Times Square Arts, Creative Time, and Governors Island Arts invite you to join us July 13 and 14, 2022 on Duffy Square for Manifestos 4: The Dred and Harriet Scott Decision, two performances marking the opening chapter of Charles Gaines’s first public art exhibition, The American Manifest.

 
Manifestos 4: The Dred and Harriet Scott Decision will take place at Duffy Square, Broadway & 46th Street, on the following dates:
 
* Wednesday, July 13: 7-8:30pm; Registered seating area opens at 6:30pm
* Thursday, July 14: 7-8:30pm; Registered seating area opens at 6:30pm
 
Free registered seating is limited, however, there is ample viewing space throughout Duffy Square, the Broadway pedestrian plaza between 46th and 47th Sts.
 
For this outdoor, live performance-based installation, Gaines transforms the original text of the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred and Harriet Scott historic decision, which decreed that people of African ancestry were not U.S. citizens, and therefore could not sue for their right to freedom. Federally sanctioning white supremacy, the ruling has long-stood as one of the court’s most disastrous decisions, irrevocably altering the course of the country’s social, cultural, and political evolution. In his return to this historical court case and its trial documents, Gaines places the inextricable legacy of slave labor in our nation’s economy directly in the center of modern-day capitalism and commerce — Times Square.
 
The 5-part performance featuring a woodwind quintet, piano, and tenor, builds upon Gaines’s Manifestos series, in which he disarms and draws upon historical texts, uniting the rational, mathematical, and lyrical structures of music with the irrationality of violence, racial tensions, and social injustice.
 
Find more information on The American Manifest here.