Kevin Jerome Everson

Practice, Practice, Practice, 2024
Single channel video projection transferred from 16 mm film (black and white; sound)
10:06 minutes
Commissioned by MOCA & The Brick
Courtesy of the Artist
Filed Under:
Kevin Jerome Everson
(b. 1965, Mansfield, Ohio; lives in Charlottesville, Virginia)
A Confederate flag had been installed on the state capitol dome in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1961 to mark the Civil War Centennial, and the state legislature passed a law to keep it there. For decades, Black activists and lawmakers called for the flag’s removal. After an NAACP boycott in 2000, the flag was taken off the dome, but on the same day, a new flag was put up at the Confederate monument directly in front of the statehouse. In 2015, white supremacist Dylann Roof entered the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, with the express purpose of killing as many Black people as possible in order to start a “race war.” The murderer’s manifesto and photos of him posing with the Confederate battle flag surfaced, prompting a national conversation about the meaning behind Confederate symbols. In the aftermath of the church shooting, Governor Nikki Haley ignored calls to banish the flag from capitol grounds. On June 27, 2015, activist Bree Newsome scaled the 30-foot flagpole and took it down herself. Haley relented and removed the flag permanently. Newsome’s direct action was among the first in a contemporary wave of protests aimed at eradicating Confederate iconography from public spaces, and her climbing gear has been displayed in an exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture.
MONUMENTS marks the tenth anniversary of these events. Newsome’s particular form of civil disobedience, however, was not without precedent.
In 1964, a Confederate flag was installed at San Francisco Civic center as part of a display of eighteen flags from throughout American history. The symbol of slavery became an instant target. Civil Rights protesters called for its removal, and it was repeatedly vandalized. Hoping to deter further attacks, the city replaced the iconic Confederate battle flag with the Confederate National flag, which resembled an earlier version of the U.S. flag. In 1981, Mayor Dianne Feinstein refurbished the flag display and reinstalled the Confederate battle flag.
In April 1984, the month of the 119th anniversary of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Richard Bradley, a member of the Spartacist League, donned the uniform of a Union soldier, climbed the 40-foot pole, and ripped down the flag. It was then burned by Pete Woolston of Local 6, International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU). The city immediately replaced the flag. The following day, Bradley again scaled the pole and, while still in the air, cut the flag to pieces. Park Department manager Thomas Malloy vowed to “replace the flag indefinitely”; a spokesperson for the Spartacist League shot back that the city would have to surround the pole with a “steel fence” to keep the group out. Mayor Feinstein declined to replace the flag a second time, claiming that her decision was based on a written request from Supervisor Doris Ward, “not because some group shimmied up a flag pole.” Two weeks later, Bradley climbed the flagless pole for a third time to hang a version of the Fort Sumter garrison flag flown in 1861, when it was bombarded by Confederate soldiers, thus triggering the Civil War. The city removed and shredded the flag. In late June, several weeks before the Democratic National Convention was set to arrive in San Francisco, a Confederate National flag was put on view, “quite by accident” according to Malloy. Rather than making a fourth climb, activists cut down the entire flagpole with an acetylene torch.
When filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson asked Bradley how he had prepared to climb the 40-foot pole, he responded: “practice, practice, practice.” Everson’s MONUMENTS commission is at once a portrait of Bradley, a reenactment of his climb, and an instruction manual. Like all of Everson’s work, Practice, Practice, Practice draws the inextricable link between Black activism and working-class struggle through small, intimate moments of everyday life, gesturing to larger historical events and societal conditions. The film opens with a shot of the historical marker for the Orangeburg Massacre in South Carolina, where Bradley now lives. We see him walking along the streets of Orangeburg to the All-Star Bowling Lanes, site of the sit-ins that led to the shooting of twenty-eight protesters by police, leaving three dead, in 1968. In voiceover narration, Bradley recalls his direct action in San Francisco. Present-day footage is intercut with archival images of Bradley roped to the pole as he shreds the flag. Below, supporters from the Spartacist League and the Labor Black League for Social Defense hold banners declaring “DOWN WITH THE CONFEDERATE FLAG OF SLAVERY & THE KKK! and FINISH THE CIVIL WAR! FORWARD TO A WORKERS STATE!”
Bradley was taught how to scale a pole by a friend who worked at AT&T. For the film, Everson engaged a phone company employee to explain the art of pole-climbing and the pitfalls to avoid (wasp nests, lightning). In a close-up of Bradley’s face lifted skyward, a telephone pole is reflected in the lens of his eyeglasses. The liquid blacks and stark whites that Everson achieves with the 16mm film stock at times approach abstraction.
Practice, Practice, Practice cements Bradley’s legacy in a long and ongoing history of activism around Confederate iconography. While Civil War reenactments conjure images of older, largely white hobbyists in a grassy field in Gettysburg or Manassas playacting the bloodiest war in American history, Everson’s portrait of Bradley’s act of civil disobedience subverts the notion of reenactment itself, prompting viewers to interrogate the ideological framework underpinning such “leisure” activities.
Kevin Jerome Everson
Since the late 1990s, Kevin Jerome Everson has created a singular body of work that conflates archival, documentary, and scripted footage, blurring the distinctions between what is real, and what is simulated. Everson works to obstruct the narratives he presents, which in turn shifts his films from representations of the everyday to a meditation on the abstract and emotive registers that exist within it.
In 2020, Everson was the recipient of the Berlin Prize at the American Academy in Berlin and the 24th Heinz Award in 2019. His films have been exhibited and screened widely, including the 15th Baltic Triennial, Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, 2024; the Newark Museum, NJ, 2023; Museum of Modern Art, NY, 2022; Block Museum, Evanston, IL, 2022; McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, 2021; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, 2019; The Museum of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles, CA, 2019; BAMcinemafest, Brooklyn, NY, 2018; National Museum of African American History and Cultural, Washington D.C., 2018; Tate Modern, London, 2017; Wexner Center of the Arts, Columbus, OH, 2017; Berkeley Museum of Art Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley, CA, 2017; among others. Additionally, Everson participated in the 2022 Berlin International Film Festival, Berlin, Germany, the 2018 Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, the 2017, 2012, and 2008 editions of the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, as well the 2013 Sharjah Biennial. His work has been exhibited internationally at film festivals including Sundance, New York, Toronto, Venice, Vienna, Ontario, London, Rotterdam, Berlin, Ann Arbor, and Oberhausen.
Everson’s work is held in the permanent collections of Akron Art Museum, Akron, California Institute of Art, Valencia, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Progressive Art Collection, Mayfield Village, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Sundance Institute Collection, UCLA, Los Angeles, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Wexner Center of the Arts, Columbus.




































































































































































































































































































































































