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End [Black Survival Guide, or How to Live Through a Police Riot]

Date2018

MediumScreen print on retroreflective vinyl with aluminum backing

Dimensions62 × 48 in. (157.5 × 121.9 cm)
frame: 63 × 49 in. (160 × 124.5 cm)

Credit LineF. V. du Pont Acquisition Fund, 2019. Commissioned by the Delaware Art Museum. Photograph of Wilmington Riots and National Guard Occupation by Ron Dubick, 1968. Courtesy of The News Journal. Text from Northeast Conservation Association, Black Survival Guide, or How to Live Through a Police Riot, c. 1960s. Daniels Collection, courtesy of the Delaware Historical Society.

Object number2019-18.13

On View

Not on view

Label Text2018 marked 50 years since the powerful and community-changing public response that followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968. Civil disturbances in Wilmington, followed by a nine-month-long occupation by the National Guard, left an indelible mark on the community. The Delaware Art Museum commissioned Hank Willis Thomas to respond to the events of 1968 through the creation of a new work of art. The resulting exhibition, Black Survival Guide, or How to Live Through a Police Riot, sheds light on this complicated moment in the city’s history.

Thomas combined historic News Journal photographs with the Black Survival Guide, or How to Live Through a Police Riot. The booklet, in the collection of the Delaware Historical Society,serves as a practical manual for surviving an occupation, outlining police and media response. The artist combined image and text on retroreflective vinyl—a material widely used in road signage. The pages of the survival guide are activated when a flash of light catches the News Journal photograph underneath. Events on the verge of being lost to historical amnesia are revealed again.