Andy Warhol

Race Riot presents a photograph of a police dog attacking a peaceful civil-rights protestor in Birmingham, Alabama. The photo was taken for Life magazine in 1963 by photojournalist and activist Charles Moore, who explained in a 2005 interview, “I don't want to fight with my fists. I want to fight with my camera.” Andy Warhol cropped Moore’s image, removed it from its original news-oriented context, and transferred it onto canvas. This process introduces an emotional distance that suggests how mass media desensitizes us to troubling events. The work’s title also prompts us to consider how resistance to racial inequality is often met with conflict and abuses of power.

–Dominic Molon, Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art

We went to see Dr. No at Forty-Second Street. It’s a fantastic movie, so cool. We walked outside and somebody threw a cherry bomb right in front of us, in this big crowd. And there was blood. I saw blood on people and all over. I felt like I was bleeding all over. I saw it in the paper last week that there are more people throwing them-it’s just part of the scene-and hurting people.

My show in Paris is going to be called Death in America. I’ll show the electric-chair pictures and the dogs in Birmingham and car wrecks and some suicide pictures.

-Andy Warhol