In 1988, African-American artist David Hammons received a commission from the Washington Project of the Arts to create a piece of work for their exhibition on black culture and modernism. Hammons chose to display his billboard publicly, near the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. which, at the time, included no non-white portraits. Hammons’ billboard displayed an image of Jesse Jackson, a central African-American figure of the Civil Rights Movement who was running for president at the time, which had been manipulated to portray Jackson as a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed man. ‘How Ya Like Me Now?’ is scrawled across the bottom, giving the billboard the appearance of a graffitied campaign poster. By making a controversial public statement in this work, Hammons draws attention to the role that race and prejudice has played in politics. He urges the viewer to consider the reasons behind the exclusion of blacks to publicly elected positions of political power.