Fred Wilson: The Flag Project

Fred Wilson (b. 1954, Bronx, NY) is renowned for his groundbreaking artistic practice across a range of media that exposes the ways museums, archives, national symbols, and even quotidian objects shape our understanding of history, identity, and culture.

Fred Wilson: The Flag Project presents a selection of the artist’s Flag paintings, installed in a mural-like procession in the stairwell of the museum’s Lois Foster Wing. What appears to be an abstract black-and-white composition unfurls as a quiet yet forceful meditation on nationhood, ruptured histories, and Black diasporic dispersal. The display is introduced by one large canvas titled Hidden Flag (2012), in which vertical red, black, and green bands evoke the Black liberation flag. Hidden Flag sets the stage for a sequence of national flags from African and African diasporic countries rendered entirely in black paint on raw cotton canvas. Stripped of color, these haunting, graphic forms reveal the skeletal structures of familiar symbols, emphasizing both presence and erasure. The materials themselves carry weight, with cotton recalling histories of enslavement and black acrylic paint situating those histories in the present. Rising through the stairwell, Wilson’s flag paintings become markers of passage and pause, prompting viewers to confront colonial legacies, fractured belonging, and the enduring possibility of a liberation that has yet to unfold.