The CCS Hessel Museum of Art premieres Birth of a Nation, a new five-channel video installation by Stan Douglas, commissioned by Hartwig Art Foundation with The Brick, Los Angeles.
Birth of a Nation reinterprets D.W. Griffith's notorious 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, a technically groundbreaking but deeply racist work that glorifies white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan. Stan Douglas focuses on one infamous narrative strand from Griffith’s film involving the character Gus—a Black man played in blackface—who is falsely depicted as a threat to a white woman, Flora. In the original, this leads to her death and Gus's lynching by the Klan.
Across the installation’s five screens, scenes from the original are mirrored, altered, and replayed from multiple perspectives. Douglas retains the black-and-white silent film style of Griffith’s work but introduces two new Black characters, Sam and Tom, both also freedmen and Confederate captains. In Douglas’s version, “Gus” is not a real person but a racist hallucination projected by white characters onto Sam and Tom, blurring identity and culpability. This misidentification echoes Douglas’s earlier work exploring racial perception and misrecognition.
Birth of a Nation challenges the influence and legacy of Griffith’s film today. As academic and cultural critic Christina Sharpe notes, "In Douglas's hands, the film becomes a multiperspectival account of the antiblackness at the center of the historical apparatus of cinema itself, not to mention at the heart of the nation."(exhibition catalogue Stan Douglas: Ghostlight).
Stan Douglas
Birth of a Nation (2025)
Five-channel video installation
Overall dimensions variable
Edition 1 of 4, 1 AP
Stan Douglas is a visual artist based in Vancouver, Canada. Since the 1980s, his practice has explored how technology, media, and narrative shape collective memory, often working within the genres of cinema, photography, and theatre to present a perspective that is deliberately staged, revisiting pivotal historical moments when “history could go one way or the other.”
Recent exhibitions include the Canadian Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale; solo shows at the De Pont Museum, Tilburg (2023), and the National Gallery of Canada (2023–2024); and a major institutional survey, Stan Douglas: Ghostlight, at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College (2025).
Birth of a Nation is commissioned by Hartwig Art Foundation with the Brick, Los Angeles. It was conceived for Monuments at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, a group exhibition opening in late 2025, and debuted in Douglas's 2025 solo exhibition Ghostlight at the CCS Hessel Museum of Art.
Collection Hartwig Art Foundation. Promised gift to the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed / Rijkscollectie.