Exhibit: Kevin Jerome Everson: Practice, Practice, Practice at the Torggler Center (Newport News)

Kevin Jerome Everson’s video Practice, Practice, Practice (2024) tells the story of Richard Bradley, who in 1984 donned the uniform of a Union soldier and climbed a 40-foot pole to remove a Confederate flag that was hanging outside the San Francisco Civic Center. Everson, whose practice has long engaged the stories of Black working class Americans, intersperses Bradley’s testimony with footage of a telephone company employee describing the skill and danger involved with climbing telephone poles, emphasizing the labor underpinning the fight for freedom.

Practice, Practice, Practice was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and The Brick (a non-collecting contemporary art space in Los Angeles) for their collaborative exhibition MONUMENTS, a major presentation of both contemporary and historical work engaging the presence of American monuments to the Confederacy and the persistence of the “Lost Cause” narrative of the Civil War.