An oil painting that depicts the head and bare, right arm of a brown-skinned man who appers to emerge from behind an American flag. The flag is turned on its side so that the stripes are vertical, and the stars are on the right. The man grasps one of the stripes of the flag in his fist. In this way, the man seems to be imprisoned by the American flag, and is trying to break free.

Flag Day

1966

Benny Andrews American, 1930–2006

United States

Benny Andrews attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1954 to 1958 on the G.I. Bill. Upon graduating, he moved to New York, where he began agitating for black artists to be represented at major museums in the city. A cofounder of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) in 1969, Andrews was increasingly categorized as a “protest artist.”

Flag Day can be read as a harbinger of two later projects—a program Andrews organized through the BECC to teach art to inmates in New York City prisons, and a large body of work from the early 1970s he made to mark America’s bicentennial. This intimately scaled, potent painting shows a black man imprisoned by the “bars” of the American flag.

Oil on canvas

African American artists

Contemporary Art

African Diaspora

SAIC Alumni and Faculty

Contemporary works by BIPOC artists, summer 2021