‘Independency: The American Flag at 250 Years’ at Southampton Arts Center

This month, Southampton Arts Center will present “Independency: The American Flag at 250 Years,” a powerful and visually striking collection of American flags and historic textiles, witnesses to watershed moments in American history, alongside the work of renowned abstract painter Sean Scully.

The exhibition is curated by historian and writer John Monsky with SAC’s Executive Director Christina Mossaides Strassfield. “Independency” will be on view from May 17 through July 16. The show’s opening reception will be held Saturday, May 24, from 5 to 7 p.m. An Artist Panel Talk will be presented on Saturday, June 21, from 5 to 6:30 p.m.

Monsky’s flags represent a lifelong collection that began in his boyhood, and it has since served as the focal point of his series of live multi-media musical journeys through history, which he presents at Carnegie Hall and the nation’s top performance venues. His “The Eyes of the World: From D-Day to VE Day,” performed with the Boston Pops from Boston’s Symphony Hall, is currently streaming on PBS.org.

The exhibition, combining both visual art and American history, will highlight objects from Monsky’s collection — from a 1775 George Washington kerchief and a flag for the candidacy of “Abram” Lincoln, to flags from the Apollo Missions, alongside Scully’s work. Insightful narrative, archival film and photography, material culture and historic documents, will enhance the visitor experience.

“Southampton Arts Center is honored to showcase the John Monsky collection,” said Strassfield. “The works in his collection, which have never been seen in their entirety, are of such historical significance that this is a rare opportunity for visitors to see such treasures. The flags, photographs, and ephemera will genuinely make history come alive on our walls.

“Sean Scully’s work adds another dimension to this exhibition,” she added. “It makes us examine the historical flags, their shapes, dimensions, and proportions more closely and see how contemporary artists have reused and reinvented those elements in their own work.”

In Gallery I, viewers will receive an introduction to the role flags have played in our history, the artistry of the stars and stripes, and the use of that geometry in art, with resonant work from Sean Scully.

Gallery II will highlight “Campaigns, Parades, and Political Expression” and offer an examination of the role flags and kerchiefs have played in politics and civic discourse, including the Presidential campaigns of Abraham Lincoln, John Quincy Adams and Ulysses S. Grant. Work from Scully continues to interact with the geometries of the textiles.

In Gallery III, the timeline jumps ahead to “Vietnam and the Moon” with a look at flags reflecting one particularly complex moment, including a tattered flag from a Swift Boat, its occupants 20-year-old boys, juxtaposed with a “Love” flag from San Francisco circa 1968. America’s passion for exploration is seen through textiles from the Wright Brothers and Amelia Earhart, as well as flags that went to the surface of the moon.

Gallery IV is titled “Sacrifice,” and the collection of flags it contains reflect the victory and heartbreak of America’s conflicts. Highlights include a pennant flown by the USS Constitution in the War of 1812, the conflict which gave us “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the flag carried by the nearly all-Black 25th Corps, that captured Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, General George Patton’s personal guidon and flags that landed on the Beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944. More contemporary flags on view will be from a memorial held for those who died on United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and one carried by a U.S. Navy Seal in Afghanistan.

“These flags reflect our history, tell our story,” Monsky said. “Flags that were at rallies, battles, celebrations — flags that were present at hope-filled moments and flags that flew during moments of tragedy. It is also important to appreciate the flag as a geometric object. Its creation was an artistic act. The field of stars calls to our dreams, but it can also be seen as a remembrance of those we have lost: the boys on Omaha Beach on D-Day, dreamers like Amelia Earhart, the astronauts who died in their effort to explore space.

“The stripes can be seen as the oceans that Americans sailed and the fields where they plowed,” he continued. “We look at the flag every day, but rarely do we contemplate its design and the moments its design captures.”

On Sean Scully’s involvement in the exhibition, he added, “Sean Scully’s work resonates powerfully with the iconic geometries of the American flag, and we are very pleased he is adding that compelling component to the gallery. Scully’s famous stripes with squares reflect upon the emotional content in these flags, bringing new perspectives and amplifying their history they help the viewer approach our flag with new eyes, as it was first seen 250 years ago.”

Scully said, “I live by the river Hudson where much of the War of Independence was fought, where George Washington sunk the American ships so that when the British Armada came up the Hudson it crashed into them, so the issue of the formation of America is consistently on our minds since we live where it was played out. Notwithstanding, my work constantly quotes flags and banners and shifting national identities.”

John Monsky is the creator, writer and narrator of the “American History Unbound” series. His reverence for historical ephemera is at the core of his productions, with his meticulous research of flags and other tangible objects driving his narratives that explore landmark events in history. His productions at Carnegie Hall include “The Vietnam War: At Home and Abroad” (2018), “We Chose To Go to the Moon” (2019), “The Eyes of the World: From D-Day to VE Day” (2021) and “The Great War and The Great Gatsby” (2023).

In 2019, Monsky was honored by The New York Historical, where he has developed and workshopped many of his lectures and serves as co-vice chair. He has appeared on CNN, CBS, and NBC. He is on the board of directors of The Rockefeller University and Yale University Art Gallery. His flag collection, which he began in his boyhood, is nationally recognized and has been featured in The New Yorker, Art & Antiques Magazine, and other publications. His historical research on George Washington has been published by the Winterthur Portfolio.

Monsky graduated from Yale College as a history major, where he was awarded the White Prize in History and the Deforest Oratory Prize. In addition to being an historian, Monsky, also a lawyer, serves as a senior partner of Oak Hill Capital, an investment firm. He lives in New York City and Southampton with his wife, Jennifer Weis. They have four children — Harrison, Annabel, Gillian, and Caitlin — and a dog, Flyer.

Sean Scully was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1945. Today he lives and works between New York, Bavaria, Aix-en-Provence, and London and his work is in the collection of virtually every major museum around the world.

The last five years have been marked by the major 50-year career retrospective “Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art,” previously shown at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas in 2021, alongside multiple solo exhibitions and retrospectives worldwide, and the inclusion of the room “Sean Scully: A Romantic Geometry of Colors,” in the collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.

This year’s major solo retrospectives are at the Daegu Art Museum, South Korea, Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera, Casa Milà, Barcelona, Spain; and the Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg, Germany; and at The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, where “Sean Scully: The Albee Barn, Montauk,” will be on view until the end of September, with an accompanying publication of essays by Deborah Solomon and Steven Henry Madoff, published by Hatje Cantz.

For more information on “Independency: The American Flag at 250 Years,” visit southamptonartscenter.org. The Southampton Arts Center is at 25 Jobs Lane in Southampton.