In 2026, the United States turns 250, a milestone that should invite reflection, not reflux. Instead, we find ourselves in a moment that feels less like a celebration than a confrontation. The nation marks its semiquincentennial while entangled in a war with Iran, amid an alarming rise in political violence directed at public officials, and in the wake of a Supreme Court decision that has further hollowed out the Voting Rights Act. Against this backdrop, the American flag, arguably, the most recognizable symbol of national identity, feels newly unstable, burdened with contradictions it can no longer easily conceal.
This is the context in which my exhibition at HEMPHILL arrived. The opportunity to present a body of work centered on the flag this year is not incidental: it is urgent. The works do not attempt to resolve what the flag means today. Rather, they insist on its instability, its fragmentation, and its susceptibility to projection. If the flag once functioned as a unifying emblem, it now operates more like a mirror, reflecting back a fractured national psyche.
Artists have long interrogated the flag’s authority. In “The Fourth of July,” (1916) Childe Hassam rendered a patriotic spectacle, flags cascading across a jubilant urban scene; an image of unity that feels almost impossibly distant. By contrast, Jasper Johns “Flag” (1954-55) collapsed the boundary between symbol and object, forcing viewers to confront the flag not as an idea but as a thing: paint, surface, construction. That rupture opened the door for subsequent generations to treat the flag less as sacred icon and more as contested terrain.
Consider Nam June Paik’s “Video Flag,” (1996) which reconstitutes the flag through flickering screens, implicating media in the production of national identity. Or David Hammons “African American Flag,” (1990) which reclaims the symbol through the colors of Black liberation, asserting a history both within the nation and as part of a larger diaspora. Even more satirical is Komar and Melamid’s “The Future American Flag,” (1980) which imagines the entire Milky Way as part of America’s dominion, a united federation of planets that predates Space Force by 40 years. Subversively prescient is Faith Ringold’s “The American People Series #18: The Flag is Bleeding,”(1967) which was made a year before the political assassinations of both RFK and MLK.
My own work enters this lineage not to echo it, but to complicate it. In “American Mosaic,” the flag is constructed from secondhand books—65 volumes selected from over 200 collected over three years. The piece resembles a quilt as much as a flag, its surface marked by wear, omission, and deliberate gaps. It asks a deceptively simple question: Which stories are allowed into the fabric of the nation? The answer, of course, is unstable. The grid suggests order, but the chromatic shifts and absences disrupt it. This is a flag that has been handled, edited, and, perhaps most importantly, contested.
In “52 Stars,” the distortion is subtler but no less pointed. The addition of two stars gestures toward unresolved political realities: Washington, DC’s lack of statehood and Puerto Rico’s ambiguous status, while also invoking broader questions of representation and belonging. The work’s familiarity is its camouflage; its deviation, its critique. It is a reminder that the flag’s authority depends on what it leaves out as much as what it includes.
“American Zippo” approaches the flag through commodification. By isolating a mass-produced lighter adorned with flag-ish imagery, the work breaks down the distance between patriotism and consumerism. The flag becomes a brand: portable, purchasable, and stripped of context. In this sense, it may be the most honest representation of the symbol today. It’s not a fixed ideal, but a flexible signifier, deployed as easily in marketing as in protest.
In “Russian American Flag II,” this tension becomes personal. I was conceived in Moscow, but born in Ohio. Drawing on the geometric language of Kazimir Malevich, the composition fragments the flag using his suprematist forms that hover between recognition and estrangement. It is both autobiographical and geopolitical, reflecting a hybrid identity that resists neat categorization. The flag here is not a declaration, but a negotiation.
Finally, “Flag, (After Jasper Johns),” confronts the uneasy marriage of art and capital. By overlaying barcodes onto the structure of Johns’s iconic image, the work interrogates how value is assigned not just to objects, but to symbols. When one of Johns’s flag paintings sold privately for $110 million in 2010, it raised a fundamental question: what, exactly, was being valued? Cultural significance? Market demand? Or the spectacle of value itself whereby money trumps understanding?
Taken together, these works suggest that the American flag no longer holds a singular meaning—if it ever did. It is a site of projection, a surface onto which competing narratives are mapped. In a year when the nation’s contradictions are especially stark, the flag does not resolve those tensions; it amplifies them.
And, perhaps that is its function now. Not to unify, but to reveal.
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