Collection Artwork
A black and white photograph of a young, black girl dancing surrounded by a circle of people looking on and cheering.
Isaac Scott (born Quincy, Illinois, 1990)
June 6th, 2020. Philadelphia Museum of Art
2020
archival pigment print
paper size: 23 x 33 in.
image size: 22 x 30 in.
The Jack Shear Collection of Photography at the Tang Teaching Museum
photographed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, North America
2020.33.5
1/25
Inscribed, dated, and signed, paper verso, lower left: “June 6th, 2020. Philadelphia Museum of Art” 2020 / Isaac Scott 1/25

Ongoing Research

Research on our collection is ongoing. If you have resources you’d like to share, please contact Associate Curator Rebecca McNamara.

Tang Collective Catalog


I had a visceral reaction to this photograph. What was so striking for me was Issac Scott’s visual language of the radical Black imagination, which is fundamentally rooted in an oppositional gaze, love, and Black joy. As a queer Black person, I see a tremendous lack of transformative representations of Blackness. Our larger sociocultural images are preoccupied with portraying Black resistance as a site of ultimate depravity and perpetual suffering, making it clear to me that anti-Blackness is both pervasive and global. Scott rejects flattening conceptions of Blackness in order to connect Black resistance to the radical Back imagination. This photograph provides that oppositional gaze of a young Black girl breakdancing while her community cheers her on. The photograph articulates that Black joy is saying yes to ourselves, yes to love, yes to excitement, yes to true reciprocity.
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