Labels begin to your left as you enter the Walsh Gallery, and continue clockwise. Labels marked with a star were contributed by Fairfield University faculty members.
David Hammons (American, born 1943)
African American Flag, 1990
Dyed cotton
Courtesy of the New School Art Collection
Hammons reimagines the familiar stars and stripes in the colors of the pan-African (or Black Liberation) flag. Created by the Universal Negro Improvement Association in the early 20th-century, the pan-African flag’s bands of green, red, and black symbolized the struggles faced by people of African ancestry and their effort to shape an identity as a unified Black nation. By combining the two flags, Hammons emphasizes that America is a Black nation.
Emma Amos (American, 1937–2020)
Sold, 1994
Color silk aquatint with photo transfer
K. Caraccio Studio, printer and publisher
Edition: 12
Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Jean and Robert E. Steele, M.P.H. 1971, M.S. 1974, Ph.D. 1975
In this artwork, the familiar stars are replaced with three Black figures who appear to be for sale, echoed by the title Sold. The ideals of freedom and democracy contrast with the bloody realities of slavery. The checkmark in the center of the strips suggests our collective acceptance, or even approval, of this brutal history.
Danielle Scott (American, born 1978)
False Flag, 2020
Photo transfer and found objects (shotgun shells) on US flag
Courtesy of the artist
Scott’s multi-layered work is a meditation on the United States’ history of violence against Black Americans. What first appear to be calligraphic markings across the flag’s white stripes are, on closer examination, repeated depictions of three lynched bodies hanging from a tree. Created in the aftermath of George Floyd’s 2020 murder, the work also protests contemporary racial violence and police brutality; a shotgun shell pierces each of the 50 stars, and the flag itself is in the “reverse” orientation often seen on police and military uniforms.
Imo Nse Imeh (American, born Nigeria, 1980)
and i’ll be there with you, 2021
Charcoal, India ink and conte crayon on unstretched canvas
Courtesy of the artist
Imeh’s work borrows its title from the speech given by President Donald Trump that inspired the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. In the foreground, the artist depicts the death of rioter Ashli Babbitt using Christian imagery of the Pietà, in which the Virgin Mary cradles the body of Jesus. Rather than suggest Babbitt’s martyrdom, the tattered American flag suggests, as Imeh has written, that Babbitt’s sacrifice was “hollow” because it was “based in lies.”
Sara Rahbar (American, born Iran, 1976)
I don’t trust you anymore, Flag #59, 2019
Mixed media, collected vintage objects, on vintage US flag
Courtesy of Sara Rahbar
This work forms part of a series that the artist began in the years following 9/11, using the American flag as a canvas. Rahbar, who emigrated from Iran to the United States after the start of the Iran-Iraq war (1980–88), stitches together a disparate range of materials as she wrestles with patriotism, politics, and her own biography.
In this reimagined American flag, the artist—who emigrated to the United States after the Iran-Iraq War, a conflict the U.S. helped ignite to destabilize both countries and weaken the region—keeps the familiar constellation of stars but forges the stripes from cartridge and utility belts, dog tags, hammered Middle Eastern charms, and crucifixes. The result lays bare a nation whose symbolic fabric has been rewoven through the gear of killing. The outline remains, but its promise hardens into iron: a banner of democratic ideals set against the reality of a nation for whom war is not an aberration but a defining identity—and a profitable industry. These weapon-laden stripes expose the gulf between the justifications offered at home—“defense,” “freedom,” “security”—and the power projected abroad through endless war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Palestine, and beyond. In this flag, the myth of democratic virtue stands next to the machinery that sustains empire.
Silvia Marsans-Sakly, PhD
Associate Professor of the Practice of History and Islamic World
Richard Klein (American, born 1955)
Transparency, 2007
Eyeglasses, ashtrays, glass jars, brass
Courtesy of the Connecticut Artists Collection, Connecticut Office of the Arts
This sculptural assemblage by Richard Klein is from one of a series of sculptures which he created with inexpensive, everyday glass objects—eyeglasses, jars, ashtrays, wine glasses, candy dishes. He assembled these pieces of glass to recreate objects that are so familiar that they are practically invisible to us. Examples of sculptural objects in this series include buckets, shopping bags, urinals, fire hydrants, and this American flag. The viewer is forced to look at the world in a new way, and, as the artist says, “to reconsider the nature of both the common glass objects and the objects that I’ve created with them.” He goes on to say, “in the case of Transparency the flag symbolizes the unity between the 50 States that constitute the U.S., and by extension an expression of the unity of the diverse peoples and beliefs that have helped form the nation. Similarly, Transparency is made of diverse parts assembled together in the service of creating a whole: its unity is dependent on all its parts functioning as one. The title of the work comes from the concept that government in a democracy should ideally be transparent: free from pretense or deceit.”
We are looking through an overlay of looking glass, but what are we seeing? The built-up bounty of found materials is simultaneously complex in its construction and refractions, but also simple in its reverence to the light. This marriage of glass and brass seems to be metaphor and warning: separately we are mere parts and together something extraordinary, though this union is as fragile as it is impressive. There is awe in the pleasing way the light bounces and may change depending on gallery light or where we stand. There is awe in the accumulation and meticulousness of the artist’s hand, though we are not as aware of the artist’s hand with these factory-made materials and precision of Klein’s construction. A viewer may also wonder: are we meant to think about the faces that wore the eyeglasses, blew out cigarette smoke and stubbed it to ash, opened the jar and threw it away? Is there something unique in how we consume, extinguish, empty, and therefore value things in America?
Lisa Thornell, MSLIS, MFA ’26
Librarian, DiMenna-Nyselius Library
June Clark (Canadian, born United States, 1941)
Dirge, 2003-4
Oxidized metal on canvas
Collection Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Purchase, with funds by exchange, and funds from Joyce and Fred Zemans, 2021
Born in Harlem, June Clark left the U.S. for Canada as a young adult. Over the course of the last three decades, the artist has created a series of works interrogating her emotional responses to the flag of her native country. In an interview, she said that this piece—made from salvaged metal from car mufflers that she collected over several years—was made in a moment when she “felt everything in the U.S. was truly falling apart, the neglect of the country, all of those things.”
Rosson Crow (American, born 1982)
Fragility (Pax Americana), 2023
Acrylic, spray paint, photo transfer, and oil on canvas
Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery
The mixture of vivid colors and interlacing objects highlights the fluidity and social construction of identity. The intentional yet subtle inclusion of cacti among other notable symbols conveys the dynamic between beauty and danger in expressing identity, while also revealing how power and culture are inherently intertwined. The depth and density of the painting reflect the complex nature of experiencing a sense of belonging and peace today. The use of layering further accentuates the intricacies of defining American culture and demonstrates how the way we communicate our identities is shaped by the interplay of our deeply rooted past, challenging present, and hopeful future. Ultimately, this artwork captures the persistent conflict between structured governmental systems and individual creative expression in contemporary America.
Erin S. Craw, PhD
Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication
Eric Fischl (American, born 1948)
You Don’t Need a Weatherman…, 2022
Acrylic on linen
Courtesy of the artist and Skarstedt Gallery
This painting is part of Fischl’s series depicting the annual Halloween parade in his hometown of Sag Harbor, New York—a setting he uses to explore the uneasy cultural tensions shaping small-town America today. In the background, a Blue Lives Matter flag appears at a larger scale than the American flag, signaling the charged political atmosphere beneath the surface of the festivities. The title, along with the storm forming in the upper right, suggests a brewing conflict that the townspeople themselves seem not to perceive.
Jeannette Montgomery Barron (American, born 1956)
Flag #1, July 2000, CT, 2000
Gelatin silver print
Edition: 8/25
Courtesy of the artist, and James Barron Fine Art
This charming small-scale photograph belongs to a decades-long series that the artist expands each year. Because Barron’s brother was born on the Fourth of July, she annually creates and sends him a photograph featuring the American flag. While widely recognized for her portraits, the artist is also noted for a moving still-life series documenting her mother’s possessions during her struggle with Alzheimer’s.
Skylar Fein (American, born 1968)
White Flag for Franklin Rosemont (small), 2019
Acrylic on plaster and wood, ink and encaustic
Courtesy of Ferrara Showman Gallery,
New Orleans
Skylar Fein’s White Flag for Franklin Rosemont reimagines the flag’s symbolism through tribute to the surrealist poet and labor radical (1943-2009). The white flag traditionally signals surrender or truce, yet Fein complicates this reading, making it simultaneously a blank canvas for utopian possibility, a gesture of peaceful resistance, and perhaps an ironic commentary on the exhaustion of revolutionary movements.
Rosemont spent his life fusing surrealist imagination with anarchism and labor organizing, insisting that genuine revolution required transforming both material conditions and consciousness itself (mind and body). Fein’s white flag honors this legacy ambiguously—is it surrender to capitalism’s totality, or the clearing of ideological space for new dreams? The absence of stars and stripes refuses nationalism while maintaining the flag’s form, suggesting that radicalism’s symbols must be perpetually reinvented. In Fein’s hands, whiteness signifies not emptiness but potentiality, inviting viewers to imagine what banner might be raised next.
Richard A. Greenwald, PhD
Dean of the John Charles Meditz College
of Arts & Sciences
Professor of History
Marina Kamena (French, born Yugoslavia, 1945)
We the People, 2023
Acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum stretchers, encased in wooden crate
Courtesy of the artist
Can you identify the icons of American life and popular culture that surround mirrored and repeating images of the flag in Kamena’s work?
The artist chose to enclose the canvas in its own crate, and explains:
The crate becomes the image of protection, a shelter for the flag, its reflection,
and the people and events that it embodies.
It holds within it the fragility of symbols and the weight of history.
It is not sacred, it is protected. To protect is not to isolate but to preserve the possibility of meaning.
The crate allows movement: It carries, travels, and transforms, just as societies evolve, shifting their values and identity.
Liu Zhong (Chinese, born 1969)
Ting Fēng (Listening to the Wind), 2014
Ink on paper
Fairfield University Art Museum, Gift of Steven C. Rockefeller, Jr. ’85 and Kimberly Rockefeller ’85, 2024, 2024.33.01
In 2014, Chinese artist Liu Zhong and photographer Steven C. Rockefeller, a fourth-generation descendant of the Rockefeller family, spent a week in a small town along the border of Wyoming and Idaho. United by their love for nature, Liu used brush and ink while Rockefeller captured the surroundings through his camera lens. Their collaboration led to the 2015 publication in China of the book A Warm Winter, featuring Liu’s vibrant paintings alongside Rockefeller’s stunning photographs.
The painting Ting Fēng represents Liu’s artistic interpretation of the American bald eagle, which was paired with Rockefeller’s photograph of the same majestic bird in the book. In the context of U.S.-China relations, this piece highlights our shared appreciation for nature and the peaceful connections that can exist between cultures.
Danke Li, PhD
Professor of History
Katharine Kuharic (American, born 1962)
Girl’s Army—the bitches, 2003
Oil on linen
Courtesy of the artist and P.P.O.W., New York
With its technicolor cornfield, trio of bulldogs, and American flags, Kuharic’s painting could be sharing a nostalgic vision of the so-called “heartland”—but the two enlistees in the titular “Girl’s Army” seem to be caught in mid-protest. Their confrontational gazes suggest that we and they are not on the same side. In fact, they may be protesting us.
Katharine Kuharic’s Girl’s Army–the bitches is part pastoral poem (set in the cornfields of “middle America”), part magical realism (with its incongruous parade of protestors), and part a kind of pop culture fiction (with its hyperrealism and vibrant palette). It is, however, all queer.
The painting’s queerness emerges in the juxtaposition of its parts. Two species of bitches march through an anonymous American cornfield, flags held high but dragging. “What is this Girl’s Army fighting for?” the viewer might ask again and again until the tableau seems almost like the hallucination of a fever dream. “What’s in America for a queer and/or an African American girl to celebrate?” Maybe nothing, their expressions might suggest, though the dogs seem happy enough. The subjects shift. The viewer is iteratively drawn to this allegorical scene, re-reading the action and finding new meaning each time.
Struggle does ensue for the viewer, and meaning is deferred, as in all queerness. But then we remember: That’s not just any flag, not just any expression, not just any gender presentation. Thus, we see the inherent protest of queerness emerge, in that sacred place, America’s heartland.
Kim Gunter, PhD
Director of Core Writing & the WAC/WID Signature Element
Professor of English
Salvador Jiménez-Flores (American, born Mexico, 1985)
La Jaula de Oro (The Golden Cage), 2020
Color screenprint
Edition: 25
Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, Connecticut, Museum Purchase, Acquisitions Fund, 2022, 2022.31.1
Frank Diaz Escalet (Puerto Rican, 1930–2012)
Mojados, 1994
Color offset print
Edition: 300, plus artist’s proofs
Fairfield University Art Museum, Gift of Ben Ortiz and Victor Torchia, Jr., 2024, 2024.34.03
The lower work in this pairing depicts migrants crossing a river, likely the Rio Grande on the U.S.-Mexico border. The American flag looms in the background representing both the hopeful destination of these migrants, and an impassible obstacle—a wall beyond which neither we nor the migrants can see, and which they may ultimately be unable to cross.
The title of the piece, Mojados, (loosely “wetbacks” in English), is a slur used pejoratively for Mexican immigrants who enter the country “without inspection.” In this piece, Puerto Rican-born artist Frank Diaz Escalet reclaims the term, as many contemporary Mexican migrants do, to highlight migrant suffering and resilience. The piece reflects the harsh political-economic context of immigration law in the mid-1990s. As NAFTA deepened displacement from Mexico’s interior, the U.S. government militarized the border, criminalized unauthorized entry, and foreclosed legal migration opportunities, producing three decades of escalating death, disappearance, and suffering as migrants are consumed in their attempts to cross the desert.
Here, Diaz Escalet shows the flag as both a desired destination and an unknown potential obstacle. The piece resonates with Jimenez Flores’ work above, La jaula de oro, in important ways. Created decades later, Jimenez Flores’s work illustrates the hardening of this border into a literal fence. While the image itself remains open to interpretation, the title La jaula de oro references a song by Los Tigres del Norte, among Mexico’s most influential musical icons. In the chorus, Los Tigres lament:
De qué me sirve el dinero / What good is money?
Si estoy como prisionero / If I’m like a prisoner
Dentro de esta gran nación / Inside this great nation
Cuando me acuerdo hasta lloro / When I remember I even cry
Que aunque la jaula sea de oro / Because even though this cage is made of gold
No deja de ser prisión / It never stops being a prison
The notion of the U.S. as a prison illuminates a central contradiction of the unauthorized immigrant experience. Restrictionist policies intended to keep “undesirable” immigrants out ultimately trap them inside by raising the risks of border crossing and penalizing unauthorized presence with multi-year bans on legal immigration. Given the U.S. government’s failure to offer a pathway to legalization for the nation’s (now nearly 14 million) unauthorized immigrants since the 1980s, the average length of unauthorized residence has steadily climbed. As of 2023, some 4.3 million unauthorized immigrants have lived in the U.S. for 18 years or more. Indeed, some of the migrants depicted crossing the Rio Grande in Diaz Escalet’s work from 1994 are likely still here—and still unauthorized.
Jennifer A. Cook, PhD
Assistant Professor of the Practice of International Studies & International Business
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
James Prosek (American, born 1975)
Invisible Boundaries, 2021
Acrylic on panel
Courtesy of the artist and Waqas Wajahat, New York
In this painting the artist asks viewers to think about the creatures with whom we share this planet who do not know the boundaries of state lines. As climate change forces new migration routes and habitats are lost, animal lives are more connected with humans than ever before.
Here Prosek presents an exemplary circle of life—bugs, birds, beasts of all sorts—in his typical detailed way. Most of these critters should be readily identifiable by the viewer even in silhouette. And why do we recognize them? Because Prosek also provides us an accurate description of where these species can be found. No, not with the typical colorful cartographic skill depicting species ranges, but with a harsh red, white, and blue identification that almost every viewer recognizes as a very distinct geographic range.
Then enter the bald eagle in living color: the equally emblematic “patriot.” It approaches, ready to attack, unencumbered, and likely greatly disrupting the circle of life…
Perhaps Mr. Prosek is as much a prophet as he is an accomplished artist.
Brian Walker, PhD
Professor of Biology
Jeremy Dean (American, born 1977)
Executive Order 13769, USA, 2018
Flag threads, 3,000 needles
From the Rended series
Lent by Gabrielle Selz
Executive Order 13769, issued by President Donald Trump on January 27, 2017, was also known as “the Muslim Ban.” It blocked the entry to the United States of people from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen for at least 90 days, regardless of whether they held valid non-diplomatic visas. Jeremy Dean unraveled flags from each of the banned nations and interwove those threads with threads taken from an unraveled American flag to create this work.
Mark Thomas Gibson (American, born 1980)
The Wringer, 2021
Ink on canvas
The Collection of Michael Citrone
Julie Mehretu (American, born 1970)
Corner of Lake and Minnehaha, 2022
17-run color screenprint on white Coventry Rag paper
Co-published by Highpoint Editions and the Walker Art Center
Edition: 45
© 2022 Julie Mehretu, courtesy of the artist, Highpoint Editions,
and the Walker Art Center
Although Mehretu is known primarily as a painter, her process of layering appropriated and manipulated imagery, personal iconography, and frenzied mark-making makes it particularly conducive to color printmaking, especially silkscreen. Each color used in composing a silkscreen image requires its own screen; a separate stencil is created for each color and can range from photographically-based images to flat shapes, drawn lines, and/or applied textures. Multiple screens are then printed sequentially, each registered carefully to align with the previous screen image, many times creating new colors and unusual effects.
Corner of Lake and Minnehaha exemplifies how technical methodology can enhance and support a conceptual framework. The base imagery in this print is a photograph of a protester carrying an inverted American flag, backlit by a liquor store in flames (the photograph was taken by AP photographer Julio Cortez, who subsequently received a Pulitzer Prize for this work). It was photographed four days after the murder of George Floyd and two miles due east of the Highpoint Center for Printmaking, on the corner of Lake Street and Minnehaha in Minneapolis.
Mehretu cropped and blurred the image, then flipped it upside down. The photograph has a coarse appearance due to an enlarged dot screen, a method used in industrial printing where all colors are approximated through dots in four colors: cyan, magenta, yellow and black (or “key,” giving the process its acronym “CMYK”). The dots vary in size in accordance with the colors they seek to replicate but are regularly spaced in four interlocking grids.
Over this image, Mehretu drew three layers of black addenda or additional color enhancements, each for a different screen, with each screen then printed in a different black (yellow-black, purple-black, and flat black). Small bursts of color were sporadically placed on top, a flickering halo surrounding pinpoints of intense light. Her last layers were focused on mark-making, with each screen executed with a different drawing technique: airy airbrush strokes; feathered marks reminiscent of sumi-e brushwork; and a computer “dither” drawing, which produces spray-paint-like splotches and clean-edged wormholes that evoke an overuse of Photoshop’s eraser tool. Mehretu’s dither drawing is not there to fix an error, but “to defy and subvert the temptations of a single coherent storyline.”
In her work, Mehretu plays with the viewer’s perception of phantom patterns within complex events, alluding to the defining feature of conspiracy theories. Through her multi-layered abstraction she is asking one to consider and reflect on the slippery strata of subterfuge.
Jo Yarrington
Professor of Studio Art
Tim Ferguson Sauder (American, born 1972)
American Flag 5, 2019
Return Design Lab, Olin College
[Nature, VT + Honorary Heather Heyer Way, Charlottesville, VA],
Plywood with gathered marks, fixative
Courtesy of the artist
This work is part of a series in which the artist explores American identity by creating flags from mark-making, both intentional and unintentional, that he collected from sources across the nation. Here, the canton’s stars are replaced by the footprints and handprints collected from a college student who ran through a field of wildflowers along a Vermont highway. The stripes are comprised of tire tracks left by cars driving through part of Fourth Street Southeast in Charlottesville, VA. This stretch of road is now known as Honorary Heather Heyer Way, marking the spot where Heyer was struck by a car and killed while peacefully protesting the Unite the Right rally in 2017.
Dread Scott (American, born 1965)
Emancipation Proclamation, 2020
Pigment print
Edition: 2/4, with 1 artist’s proof
Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery
“There is no Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck without slavery.
That’s the history and legacy of America.”
– Dread Scott
On July 5, 1852, the writer and abolitionist Frederick Douglass posed perhaps the most consequential question in American history, asking, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” Stunning in its directness, Douglass’s speech exposed the hypocrisy of our supposed independence, which depended still upon the subjugation and enslavement of millions.
Similarly, the work of the artist Dread Scott, burns—both literally and figuratively—with the indignation of the unfulfilled promise of liberation. Taking its title from the executive order signed by President Lincoln in 1863, Scott’s Emancipation Proclamation, executed in the wake of George Floyd’s extrajudicial murder by a white police officer in Minneapolis, reminds us of the ways in which the violence of the past remains, for some, ever present.
Sarah Churchill, PhD
Adjunct professor of Art History & Visual Culture
Glenn Ligon (American, born 1960)
Untitled, 2002–2024
Digital pigment print on Canson Platine paper
Edition of 7, 3 artist’s proofs
Courtesy of the artist
This piece is difficult to understand at first glance. Closer inspection reveals a grommet and triangular shapes like incomplete stars, leading the viewer to recognize that this is an American flag crumpled at the bottom of a wash bucket, abstracted of its familiar colors and patterns. Is it this specific artifact that has been thrown away? Or does Ligon suggest the ideals the flag embodies have similarly been discarded?
Shepard Fairey (American, born 1970)
American Rage, 2020
Offset lithograph on Speckletone paper
Fairfield University Art Museum, Museum Purchase, 2023.03.01
Demian DinéYazhi’ (Diné, born 1983)
My Ancestors Will Not Let Me Forget This, 2020
Letterpress print
Forge Project Collection, traditional lands of the Moh-He-Con-Nuck
Between 1778 and 1871, the United States signed more than 350 treaties with various Native peoples, virtually none of which have been honored. While the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granted citizenship to all Native Americans, many still faced voting restrictions in select states until 1957. Restrictive voter laws, poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation continued until the Voting Rights Act of 1965—and even that progress has since eroded.
In My Ancestors Will Not Let Me Forget This, Demian DinéYazhi’ reminds us that for their Diné ancestors—and perhaps the Diné today—the flag meant one thing: a threat to their people from an expanding, rapacious, ruthless imperial power, the United States of America. Like other Native nations, the Diné had tried to accommodate the U.S. by signing treaties, which the U.S. broke. In 1863, the legendary mountain man Kit Carson, now a Colonel commanding the 1st New Mexico Volunteers, led his men on a scorched earth, total war against the Diné because they had refused to be confined on a reservation. After terrorizing the Diné—destroying their villages, crops, and livestock—he and his men rounded up 8,000 starving Diné and marched them 300 miles to a prison. During the march, the Diné were dehumanized by the soldiers’ brutality; men were murdered when soldiers stole their wives; a young mother and newborn were left to die; women were raped. In total, 200 died. Freed in 1868, a traumatized Diné walked back to their homelands, now reduced to a reservation.
Peter L. Bayers, PhD
Professor of English
Stephanie Syjuco (American, born Philippines, 1974)
Color Checker (Pileup), 2019
Archival pigment print
Edition: 8
© Stephanie Syjuco. Courtesy of the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, CA,
and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York
Left
Robert von Sternberg (American, born 1939)
9/11 Flags, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California, 2012
Archival inkjet print
Fairfield University Art Museum, Gift of the artist, 2025, 2025.09.04
Upper Right
James Prez (American, born 1953)
Twin Towers: Everyday’s A Bonus, September 15, 2001
Acrylic on wood panel
Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, Connecticut, Gift of Benjamin Ortiz and
Victor Torchia, Jr., 2023, 2024.9.2
Lower Right
Nathan Lyons (American, 1930–2016)
Untitled [2 flags over God Bless America poster], from the series After 9/11, 2001
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, Purchased with the Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., Class of 1913, Fund and gifts from Arthur Fleischer, Jr., B.A. 1953, LL.B. 1958 and Betsy Karel
For 13 months following 9/11, Nathan Lyons traveled across the country to big cities and small towns to document the nation’s response to the terror attacks. His photographs explore the broad range of meanings that the American flag took on in that period, from a rallying symbol of unity to one of patriotism overtly positioned within growing Islamophobia.
Kristin Capp (American, born 1964)
West 43rd Street, New York, 1998
Gelatin silver print
Fairfield University Art Museum, Gift of the artist, 2025, 2025.42.01
This work, depicting the old New York Times building, was included in Capp’s second monograph entitled Americana (2000). The photographs in this series, taken primarily in rural towns as Capp traveled across the country, capture an intimate portrait of America. This image of the flag flying in New York City contrasts with images of cowboys and small-town life.
Morton Kaish (American, 1927–1925)
Stars and Stripes, 1996 (completed 2021)
Acrylic on linen
Collection of the Kaish Family Art Project
This piece is among the largest paintings that Kaish ever created. The artist explained
it as a meditation on the Civil War, reflecting on “the idea of entrances and exits—and the light beyond.” At the top, a waving flag appears, its canton cropped to omit the stars from our view, perhaps a commentary on the challenge of reunifying the states those stars symbolized.
In the adjacent image by Kristin Capp of the flag flying in front of the old New York Times building, the angle and cropping of the shot similarly hide the stars from our view.
Hank Willis Thomas (American, born 1976)
This Ain’t America, You Can’t Fool Me, 2020
Hand-glazed porcelain
Edition: 5/5, with 2 artist’s proofs
© Hank Willis Thomas. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Thomas reimagines a large slice of watermelon (a fruit often stereotypically associated with Black Americans) with cheerful stripes. Seeds stand in for stars. The work is brightly colored and smoothly glazed, yet rather than playfulness, the title injects a bitter note. Should we imagine its speaker to be the person who took the missing bite, and discovered all was not as it appeared to be?
Jay Critchley (American, born 1947)
Old Glory Condom Corporation condom package display, 1990
Cardboard box with condom packages
Courtesy of the artist
Conceptual artist Jay Critchley launched the Old Glory Condom Corporation on Flag Day in 1990, concurrent with the World AIDS Conference in San Francisco. He called on then-president George H. W. Bush to organize an army of “safer sex soldiers” to fight HIV/AIDS. His corporation was denied a trademark on the grounds that “it was immoral and scandalous to associate the flag with sex.” After a three-year legal battle, the trademark was ultimately granted.
Fairfield alumnus Jay Critchley’s work surveys the American experiment through a distinctly queer lens, yet his practice remains rooted in Massachusetts, whether in Provincetown’s utopian fringe or Boston’s colonial core. These sites, foundational to the nation’s mythology, also function as arenas of queer liberation, where origin stories and radical reimaginings intersect. Critchley thrives in this productive tension, crafting a queer ambivalence that moves between patriotism and rebellion.
This balance is sharply realized in Old Glory, where condoms wrapped in American flags recast safe queer sex as an act of civic duty, echoing the visual rhetoric of World War-era propaganda. Created in 1989, at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, this work accompanied Critchley’s call for “an army of safer sex soldiers,” a pointed use of militaristic language that underscored both the urgency of the epidemic and the hypocrisy of a nation that waged symbolic wars while denying queer people the right to openly serve.
Sean F. Edgecomb, PhD
Associate Professor of Theatre and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Director, Fairfield University Arts Institute
Maria de Los Angeles (American, born Mexico, 1988)
Freedom Is Not Free?, 2025-2026
Mixed media textile, painting, drawing, collage, American flag, Mexican flag, self-made flags, painting fragments
Contributions by workshop participants, embroidery by Marina Cisneros
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist
The Fairfield University Art Museum commissioned this textile sculpture, part of a series begun in 2019, to greet exhibition visitors in the center of the Walsh Gallery. The artist, a formerly undocumented Mexican-American, uses a broad array of found materials, including American and Mexican flags and fragments of her own paintings, drawings, and collages, as well as contributions of embroidery and pieces created by workshop participants, to explore themes of freedom, migration, displacement, and belonging.
Julie Learson
Costumier and Adjunct professor of Visual & Performing Art
Above Door
Deborah Nehmad (American, born 1952)
old glory?, 2017
Waxed handmade Nepalese paper, hand stitching, pigmented prints, pyrography, and collage
Courtesy of Deborah G. Nehmad
The “stripes” in this flag are comprised of 33,000 stitches the artist executed to highlight and document the average number of deaths from gun violence in America from 2014–2016. Each black x stands for a suicide, while each red crosshair represents a homicide. In the canton, 50 stars are replaced by 50 circles, portrayed as targets burned with holes representing the total number of victims of mass shootings in each state during the period from 1992–2017.
Walsh Lobby
Joseph Smolinski (American, born 1975)
Thin Ice, 2020
Digital animation, 6 minutes 30 seconds
Courtesy of the artist
Thin Ice draws on American truck commercials and the artist’s memories of growing up in Minnesota, where he remembers that each spring, television news reports would air the latest automobile stranded on, and sinking through, the thinning ice of area lakes. Fueled by automotive fetishism and masculine folly, Smolinski views it as a metaphor for the current state of the environment. Created during the lead-up to Donald Trump’s first term, this work also references the often-ubiquitous sight of the president’s supporters driving large vehicles with oversized American and Trump flags flying behind them.
The flag Smolinski used to animate this piece was appropriated from an image of Jasper Johns’ Flag from 1954 – 55 in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Most of the breaking and shifting ice audio was recorded on a Minnesota lake during the spring thaw in 2019, and the graphics on the truck are taken from a satellite view of the Larsen Ice Shelf breaking up in Antarctica.
Thin Ice is where things go to die.
In Smolinski’s Thin Ice, we see a flagpole penetrate the scene from the bottom up. As our view increases, we are brought into a desolate landscape of a truck teetering on Thin Ice.
Thin Ice is a sexy hero because of the sounds it makes as it circludes (Bini Adamczak) what gets a little too close. The ice rises up and pushes itself upon the truck and soon the flag.
It’s guzzling the flag and an unidentified gas guzzler, to be slowly dissolved in the belly of the waters. I’m imagining the waters as a Lady Vengeance (one of Park Chan-wook’s characters), coping with the imposed trauma of this penetration; retaliation and retribution for years of American fascism.
I was recently told (gossip or otherwise) that the cave paintings at Lascaux were not renderings of the present, but depictions for the future of a starving people. I wonder if this is both.
Gabriel Sacco
Adjunct professor of Studio Art
Sonia Kennebeck (German-American, born 1980),
Tetiana Anderson (American, born 1975)
Danielle Scott: Ancestral Call, 2024
Video, 16 minutes
Starfield Media, PBS American Masters, Firelight Media
Scott’s work False Flag, seen briefly in this film, is on view in the Walsh Gallery.
This film tells the story of Danielle Scott, a legally blind Afro-Cuban, Polish-Jewish, and Asian mixed-media artist at the cusp of international fame, who risks her wellbeing by exposing herself to the intergenerational trauma of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
Kennebeck and Anderson cinematically mirror the artist’s work by using a layered approach in the production of the film, similar to how Danielle Scott uses collage, archival records, images, and painting to create her art. The filmmakers conducted main interviews in a carefully staged theatrical setting, featuring meaningful historical items, collected by the artist. By projecting images on Scott and recording the score live during production, the directors risked the safety of a more traditional filmmaking approach, so that their work honors and reflects Scott’s multifaceted humanity, and artistic vision.
“Why does our history matter today?” The artist Danielle Scott poses this question in a film that deftly interweaves Scott’s personal explorations of her family history with her investigations into the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Through sharp editing that mimics the artist’s collage-focused processes, the filmmakers show how Scott links the personal to the political, as she unearths the lives behind historical photos, making the pain of the past intimately present. The filmmakers’ unconventional stylistic choices include an accumulation of textures, images, and music layered upon a reflective and personal interview with the artist. These choices work in dialogue with the artist’s process, connecting disparate images to derive new meanings, while capturing the ethereal, contemplative rhythms of Scott’s work, opening up meditative spaces for reflection. The film includes an echoing refrain from James Baldwin: “If you don’t know where you came from, then you don’t know where you are, and you can’t find out where you’re going.”
Meryl C. O’Connor
Assistant Professor of the Practice of Film, Television & Media
