Damon Davis: All Hands On Deck

This installation occurred in the past. The archival installation summary below describes the installation as it was conceived while on view.

Damon Davis’s All Hands On Deck is a powerful artwork that addresses social justice and the call for change. He conceived the original photographs of hands held up high during the months-long protests after Michael Brown Jr. was shot and killed in Ferguson in August 2014. Davis and his colleagues pasted the images onto boarded-up storefronts along West Florissant Avenue, where they shared space with many other rapidly improvised textual and visual statements. Images of the storefronts were broadcast around the world.

Recalling the protestors’ chant “Hands up don’t shoot” that was echoed throughout the protests—they were photographed with their “hands up.” That signal of surrender, however, is transformed in Davis’s photographs into one of resistance, fortitude, and community. In the artist’s own words: “The project in itself was a protest to change the physical space of the street in the aftermath of the murder of Michael Brown Jr. 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.”

In 2015, Wildwood Press in St. Louis published a limited-edition portfolio of All Hands On Deck. The Museum will display this set of large photolithographs, which it acquired in 2016, in its entirety: six of them in Gallery 212S, and one in the fall exhibition Art Along the Rivers.

Davis is a multi-disciplinary artist based in St. Louis. His documentary about the Ferguson protest movement, Whose Streets?, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017 and has received broad critical attention. Among his many other awards, he was named a 2020–2021 Citizen Artist Fellow at Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.

Damon Davis: All Hands On Deck is curated by Elizabeth Wyckoff, curator of prints, drawings, and photographs; and Hannah Klemm, associate curator of modern and contemporary art.

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