“Flag Story Quilt” (1985) by Faith Ringgold is currently on view at the Spencer Museum of Art.
This Provocative New Exhibit Asks Whether It’s Time To Retire The American Flag… And What Should Replace It
This Is Not America’s Flag. When these words illuminated Times Square’s Spectacolor display board in 1987, superimposed on the Star-Spangled Banner, many US citizens were aghast. Even represented by a low-resolution grid of lights, the image of stars and stripes stirred patriotic fervor superpowered by decades of Cold War rhetoric.
Yet the assertion was irrefutably true. Although people in the US routinely referred to their country as America, most of the American continent never belonged to them. Americans flew many different flags, the majority of which were not red, white, and blue. With his animated Times Square billboard, commissioned by the Fund for Public Art, the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar sought to set the record straight. As he explained in an artist’s statement, referring to the US as “America” amounted to a verbal assault, an assertion of power that illegitimately co-opted “the ‘other’ countries of the American continent” including his South American homeland.
Alfredo Jaar, A Logo for America, 1987. Animatiion, 38′. Original animation commissioned by The . [+] Public Art Fund for Spectacular Sign, Times Square, New York, 1987. Courtesy Public Art Fund, New York, Galerie Lelong & Co. New York and the artist. © 2022 Alfredo Jaar / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Alfredo Jaar / Artists Rights Society
Little has changed over the past three-and-a-half decades. Many Americans – or, rather, US citizens – still use language befitting the Monroe Doctrine when speaking of the United States. The so-called American flag is still used to claim foreign territory under false pretenses of unity, and to advance unwarranted claims of inclusivity domestically, often backed by violence and oppression.
A new exhibition at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles takes Jaar’s headline as its title and presents documentation of his work alongside critical perspectives on the Star-Spangled Banner by more than twenty other artists. The work is eclectic, but the topic is important.
At the core of the exhibit are a couple of the most famous depictions of flags in modern art: two Flag paintings by Jasper Johns, one from 1960 and the other from 1967. The latter is of particular interest thematically because Johns painted the stars and stripes on a collage of news clippings documenting the Vietnam War. Previously Johns had probed the ontological status of the flag, investigating whether there was any difference between a flag and its depiction, and shown the flag’s purported authority to be an optical illusion. With his 1967 version, Johns grounded the illusion in reality, paradoxically giving his picture more substance than its subject. Held accountable by the artist, an emblem of national glory was made to testify against itself.
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The importance of this work – which was transformational in the development of Pop – becomes even more apparent when considered outside the museum in a political context. The symbolic power of a flag can be deployed to incite or coerce or subdue while distracting from the consequences with its high-concept abstraction. Although he cannot neutralize these effects on his own, Johns gives viewers a basis for seeing through the polemic.
Other artists have recognized that the grandiose symbolic power of the flag is its greatest vulnerability because the symbol can be inverted, and the inversion can become as potent as the original. In 1990, David Hammons showed how effective this maneuver could be by making a version of the US flag with the red, black, and green of the Pan-African flag designed by Marcus Garvey in 1920. Hammons’ African-American Flag defamiliarizes the most iconic of national emblems just enough to destabilize everything we’re told it represents. The subtle otherness of the African-American Flag visualizes the racially compromised background of the Star-Spangled Banner – which once united free and slave states in a hallucinatory field of stars – and calls attention to the fact that this standard bearer of liberty and justice flies over a nation where those values are still unevenly distributed at best.
David Hammons, African-American Flag, 1990. Dyed cotton. The Broad Art Foundation. © David Hammons
Some works in the exhibition expand upon Hammons’ tactics. For instance, Hank Willis Thomas has made versions of the flag that turn the stripes into a labyrinth or that assign stars to victims of gun violence. (The latter is a staggering 452 inches long.) These subversions of well-known tropes are best understood as satire. The original flag is required to give them meaning. In other words, they serve a function that is essentially critical, akin to Alfredo Jaar’s words of denial.
One question provoked by the Broad exhibition is whether we should start over, whether the flag of the United States is so tainted by its past that an altogether new design is needed. None of the exhibited artists take up this challenge, which may be a wise decision given the risk of fixing the flag without repairing the nation. It’s premature to claim victory over the ugliness of the past. A new flag could evoke new ideals – and has the potential to rally us on their behalf – but the aesthetics of hope could also distract us from real problems as often happens with agitprop. If a new flag is to be raised, it should be incomplete. Or it should be ambiguous like the optical illusions in Johns’ Seasons – and like the so-called American Dream.
On the other hand, there are ways in which flags might do real work, fostering a more perfect union. Even If Johns is right about flags being articles of illusion, the illusion is delivered materially. Making flags together, people can weave new relationships, suturing historical divisions.
Sonya Clark compellingly explored this possibility during a residency at the Fabric Workshop and Museum several years ago. Clark (who is represented at the Broad with a flag painted on the gallery wall in shades of white) sought in that earlier work to replace the notorious Confederate Battle Flag with another flag of the Confederacy: a white dish towel that was flown by General Robert E. Lee to signify his surrender to Ulysses S. Grant. To make the change, she set up looms where Fabric Workshop visitors could take turns making Confederate Flags of Truce by hand. All were the same. Each one was unique.
The participatory nature of Clark’s Fabric Workshop project can serve as a model for future flags that enact what they symbolize. They might even unify through their diversity.
For Faith Ringgold, the American Flag Has Always Been a Potent and Powerful Symbol
“Flag Story Quilt” (1985) by Faith Ringgold is currently on view at the Spencer Museum of Art.
THE AMERICAN FLAG, its design and all that it symbolizes, is the basis for some of the most politically potent and astute work Faith Ringgold has made over past half century.
In 1970, she helped organize the “People’s Flag Show” at the Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan’s West Village. Featuring about 100 works invoking the American flag, the exhibition was mounted as a protest against laws that restricted the use and display of the symbol. The show opened on a Monday and that Friday, Nov. 13, Ringgold and two other artists, John Hendricks and Jean Tuche, were arrested.
The U.S. Attorney General’s office charged the Judson Three, as they became known, with desecration of the flag and shut down the exhibition. They were ordered to pay $100 each in fines or serve 30 days in jail. Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union provided them with counsel and all of the charges were subsequently dropped on appeal.
Ringgold had produced flag paintings in the years prior to the exhibition in her American People and Black Light series. Earlier this year, on April 23, she gave a lecture at Humboldt University of Berlin and walked the audience through both series. When she got to “The Flag is Bleeding” (1967) she said, “The 60s was rough,” and emphasized her desire to document the times.
“Most artists were not paying attention… They were painting beautiful paintings abstractly…but they were not telling the story of what was going on in America and I thought I wanted to be that person,” Ringgold said. “For that, I paid a terrific price. It was hard. They put me out and tried to keep me out, but I persisted.” Now museums are acquiring her paintings from those series which were once viewed as controversial.
“Most artists were not …telling the story of what was going on in America and I thought I wanted to be that person.” — Faith Ringgold
RINGGOLD RETURNED TO THE FLAG as a point of departure in her quilt work. Her “Flag Story Quilt” (1985) is currently on view in “Paying Homage: Celebrating the Diversity of Men in Quilts” (June 2-Aug. 26, 2018) at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
Featuring tie-dye fabric made by Marquetta Johnson and 50 white heads, a lengthy story is written within the stripes of Ringgold’s “Flag Story Quilt.” The narrative explores the life of someone named Memphis Cooly. The museum’s exhibition label describes it as “a heart-wrenching tale of racism about a tragic black male hero.”
“Paying Homage” coincides with the National African American Quilt Convention (NAAQC) hosted by the Spencer Museum July 11-14. In its second year, the gathering “celebrates African-American history, quilting traditions and contemporary artistic practices.” Ringgold is the keynote speaker.
ON THIS FOURTH OF JULY, Ringgold’s experiences representing the flag resonate. Americans dissatisfied with the state of nation and the policies and values espoused by the current Administration increasingly rely on their freedom of expression and freedom of speech rights to respond, object, engage and protest.
Inspired by the composition of the American flag, Ringgold made the exhibition poster for the “People’s Flag Show.” She featured the show’s name, date, and location where the stars are usually located and included a provocative message within the stripes, which was adapted from a statement by her daughter, Michelle Wallace.
It read: “The American people are the only people / Who can interpret the American flag / A flag which does not belong to the people / To do with as they see fit ∙ Should be burned and forgotten ∙ Artists, workers, / Students, women, third world peoples ∙ You are oppressed ∙ What does the flag mean to you? / Join the peoples answer to the repressive U.S. govt & state laws restricting our use & display of the flag.” CT
TOP IMAGE: FAITH RINGGOLD, “Flag Story quilt,” 1985 (cotton canvas, dyeing, piecing, appliqué, ink, 57 x 78 1/16 inches). | Museum purchase: Peter T. Bohan Art Acquisition Fund, 1991.0040
FAITH RINGGOLD, “The People’s Flag Show,” 1971 (offset lithograph, 18 × 24 inches). | © 2018 Faith Ringgold / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
FAITH RINGGOLD, “Black Light Series #10 Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger,” 1969 (oil on canvas). | Courtesy of ACA Galleries NYC
Giving a lecture at Humboldt University of Berlin in April 2018, Faith Ringgold said Chase Bank almost bought her painting “Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger.” That was before they read it.
Ringgold said: “The guy told the girl, ‘Look out. This woman writes in her work. Don’t you understand. You’ve got to read the work.’ He said, ‘Read the work? Yes. Read it. What she’s saying is D-I-E.’ ‘Die. So what does that mean? That doesn’t mean anything. Die.’ He said, No. Put your head to the left and read N-I-G…. Oh, my God! And they ran out the door. Millions spent on the moon and nothing for the starving children. That’s what I was saying there.”
“Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger” was featured in the traveling exhibition “American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold’s Paintings of the 1960s” (2013) and more recently in “Power: Work By African American Women From The Nineteenth Century To Now” (March 29-June 10, 2017), a group show at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles.
FAITH RINGGOLD, “American People Series #18, The Flag Is Bleeding,” 1967 (oil on canvas). | From the artist’s collection. © Faith Ringgold, SDAGP, Paris, 2016
“The Flag is Bleeding” (1967) from Ringgold’s American People Series was included in “The Color Line: African American Artists and Segregation” (Oct. 4, 2016-Jan. 15, 2017), the exhibition at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris. The show featured more than 200 works in a variety of mediums by modern and contemporary African American artists.
BOOKSHELF
“American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold’s Paintings of the 1960s” explores some of the paintings featured in the artist’s new exhibition at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London. Ringgold’s work is also featured in the catalogs for two sweeping exhibitions documenting the experience of black women artists (We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85: “Sourcebook” “New Perspectives”), and the wide variety of ways African American artists expressed themselves in the 1960s and 70s (“Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power”). In addition, Ringgold has published many books for children, including “We Came to American,” which explores the nation’s rich history of immigration and diversity.
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American Flag Paintings
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