“The African American Flag is a quintessential David Hammons gesture. It’s his most iconic piece. It situates African Americans as the backbone of the country by the labor it took to build this country.”
Fifty stars and thirteen stripes in black, red and emerald green: stitch after stitch, David Hammons deftly constructs his African American Flag, one of the artist’s most searing interventions into the historical, political and cultural foundations of the United States of America. One of an edition of ten plus two artist’s proofs, the present work is a rare example from a limited suite of Flags which are now housed in such major institutional collects ions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Broad Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; and The Studio Museum, Harlem, among others. African American Flag takes the United States flag as it was conceived in 1959 upon Hawaii’s admission as the fiftieth state and reimagines it in the colors of the Pan African flag, adopted in 1920 by the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL). Probings simultaneously broader, often diaMetricas lly opposed relationships between patronage and power, the present work joins two fraught historiographies as it assertively appropriates and recontextualizes the U.S. flag and its manifold associations with triumph and conquest, colonization and enslavement.
Through an intense handsewn process, Hammons challenges the apocryphal myths upon which this country was built through the primacy of color and intimacy of craftsmanship. With a sculptural weight that underscores its conceptual gravity, African American Flag questions in its monumental presence the legacy that we salute day after day, asks whether we understand the full scope of violence and inequity attached to the object we raise high above our homes and schools, and powerfully presents an alternative national banner.
Hammons first conceived the African American Flag while working alongside curator Jan Christiaan Braun, who was at the t.mes organizing Black USA, an exhibition of African American artists at the Museum Overholland in Amsterdam. It was in the context of this show that the nylon version of Hammons’ African American Flag made its debut hanging in the museum’s courtyard as an homage to his earlier street interventions. In taking the U.S. flag as his readymade, Hammons took on the country’s legion of exclusionary constitutional rights, superficial promises of an American Dream, and repeated acts of violence: the “self-evident truth” of equality so proudly touted in the Declaration of Independence is proven only ostensibly so, penned by and for men who not only believed in but relied upon the enslavement of an entire race. In the present work Hammons reclaims this history, eschewing the red, white, and blue of Old Glory, and inserting the colors of the Pan African flag, each representing the blood, skin color, and natural resources of the African continent. Hammons here uses cotton to construct the work in an affecting reclamation of the crop that fueled the transatlantic slave trade and triggered irreparable generational trauma. Through African American Flag Hammons forges his own declaration, here as much a question as it is a stat.mes nt: in whose honor does the American flag fly?
David Hammons’ African American Flag in Prestigious Institutional collects ions
“Mr. Hammons doesn’t have to show up for commentary; he has spoken...Are we listening [to]— which far exceeds the task of merely viewing— the flag?”
Through his reinvention of this symbol in service of socio-political critique, Hammons enters into a negotiation of art and objecthood. African American Flag may take the form of a flag, but in an intellectually loaded Johnsian gesture, Hammons also asserts it as an image, a representation, of a flag, and thus its larger associations are transformed into a surface, site, or cipher of American political culture and ideas around artistic mastery. Its tensile materiality complicates traditional understandings of works of art, hanging alternately from a pole, from two nails, or draped on a flat surface, as such interrupting the hallowed sanctity of white cube gallery spaces and the values upheld by the art historical canon in a confident rejection of the fetishization of High Art.
A superlative example of Hammons’ most conceptually potent output, African American Flag reveals American nationalism to be a mere simulation of values that were never realized from their onset. The social, political, and artistic resonances of the Stars and Stripes have been turned in on themselves, deconstructed, and presented anew in the present work as a test.mes nt both to Hammons’ vision and the Black American’s lived experience and ancestral legacy. So successful is Hammons in his artistic intervention that African American Flag has earned a far-reaching cultural legacy as a device of power and protest: from its widespread deployment in the Black Lives Matter movement to an adaption’s feature in Beyoncé’s Black is King film, the present work has since had a propulsive effect on the politics of race that inspired its genesis.
