Tickets

David Hammons African American Flag 1990

  • MoMA, Floor 4, 415 The David Geffen Galleries

African American Flag reimagines the United States flag, replacing its colors with the red, green, and black of the Pan-African Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded in 1914. Hammons created this version—one in an edition of ten—for an exhibition at Jack Tilton Gallery in New York City in 1990. The installation featured African American Flag as well as the flags of South Korea and Yemen, each suspended above an oil drum containing a block of ice that gradually melted. Titled Who’s Ice Is Colder, the presentation slyly parodied the rivalries that existed among residents from the three communities over the ownership of neighborhood corner stores and bodegas throughout New York City.

Gallery label from 2024
Additional text

Hammons’s African American Flag reimagines the United States flag, replacing its colors with the red, green, and black of the Pan-African Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded in 1914.

Hammons created this version of African American Flag—one in an edition of 10—for the exhibition Who’s Ice Is Colder at Jack Tilton Gallery in New York in fall 1990. The installation featured African American Flag alongside the flags of South Korea and Yemen. Each of the flags was suspended above an oil drum containing a block of ice that gradually melted—a sly send-up on the rivalries that existed among the three communities over the ownership of neighborhood corner stores and bodegas throughout New York City.

Hammons first devised African American Flag for the exhibition Black USA at the Museum Overholland in Amsterdam in spring 1990.

Additional text from 2022
Medium
Canvas and grommets
Dimensions
59 × 94 1/2" (149.9 × 240 cm)
Edition
10 (This edition was the second version of Hammons's African American Flag.)
Credit
Promised gift to The Museum of Modern Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem by the Hudgins Family in memory of Jack Tilton
Object number
PG501.2017
Copyright
© 2024 David Hammons / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Department
Painting and Sculpture

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