Damon Davis, American, born 1985; published by Wildwood Press, Saint Louis, Missouri; "All Hands On Deck #3", 2015
Damon Davis’ All Hands on Deck will be on view at The Saint Louis Art Museum September 17–March 27, 2022. The work—six large-scale photolithographs—is a response to the 2014 protests after the shooting death of Michael Brown Jr. in August of that year in Ferguson. Davis is an East St. Louis native and a multimedia artist who was a co-director of Whose Streets?, which débuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017. It covered the Ferguson uprising. In 2020, Davis was named a Citizen Artist Fellow at Kennedy Center in Washington.
For All Hands on Deck, Davis took photographs of Ferguson protesters' hands and, with the help of others, printed them onto 3-foot sheets of paper. He then plastered the photos onto boarded-up storefronts along West Florissant Avenue.
The Ferguson protesters chanted “Hands up, don’t shoot” during their rallies as a sign of surrender and as a response to the unarmed killings of Black people in the country. Davis’ photographs became a symbol of community, fortitude, and resistance. They were part of a 2016 exhibit called Damon Davis: All Hands on Deck through the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. An original window board from the Ferguson installation is now part of the permanent collection of The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.
All Hands on Deck "was a protest to change the physical space of the street in the aftermath of the murder of Michael Brown,” Davis said in a release. “The boarded-up buildings created a narrative of destruction before anything had even happened, and that fed into the media’s biased portrayal of the protesters. It was a way to weaponize art to create a counternarrative centered on the unity and love I saw every time I went out to protest. It sought to raise the morale of the protest community to continue the long fight.”
The installation is curated by Elizabeth Wyckoff, curator of prints, drawings, and photographs, and Hannah Klemm, associate curator of modern and contemporary art.
