32 Questions for DeRay Mckesson was commissioned by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art as part of Now, my retrospective exhibition touring the United States.

DeRay Mckesson (b. Baltimore, MD, 1985), a Bowdoin alumnus (Class of 2007), is an American civil rights activist, and one of the key figures in the Black Lives Matter Movement. He is also an inveterate user of Twitter as a platform for activism and advocacy, with over 150,000 tweets to his name. His work around social justice, community organization, and police and community relations in the African American community in the United States has won him praise as a strong voice for change.

Penetrating into the very nature of Mckesson’s outreach to the public, the portrait consists of an interview of Mr. Mckesson, using questions provided by students at Bowdoin and shot on high-definition video by the artist with help from his students at NYU. This interview is then indexed and dynamically annotated with the Twitter messages that have galvanized his supporters. By creating an edited database of topical clips, the piece uses comments from Mckesson’s interview to reference similar themes from his social media archive, with his tweets appearing as a scrolling gloss on what he says in the interview. Mckesson's verbal and online rhetoric interact to provide a portrait of a man at the center of a movement. The piece addresses a critical moment in our struggle for racial equality in the twenty-first century and lays bare the structure and the content of the information that have helped mobilize efforts to promote opportunity and respect for all members of our increasingly diverse society.

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