print
- Museum number
- 2015,7001.1
- Title
- Object: Stars and Stripes
- Description
-
Image of the American flag, with a cross over the red stripes and in the left corner, instead of the usual stars, is an image of African-American children. 1995
Colour monoprint and photo laser transfer on paper
- Production date
- 1995
- Dimensions
-
Height: 370 millimetres (image)
-
Height: 562 millimetres (sheet)
-
Width: 570 millimetres
-
Width: 757 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- The photograph used in this print was taken by George Shivery, a black photographer and close friend of the artist's family while she was growing up in Atlanta, Georgia. Most of Shivery's photographs were taken in the southern states of America in the 1930s and 1940s. Emma Amos inherited the photographs when Shivery died along with the right to use them.
Text from Coppel, Daunt and Tallman, 'The American Dream: pop to the present', London: Thames and Hudson in association with the British Museum, 2017, cat. no. 179:
Despite the title, the stars are missing from Amos’s American flag. In their place is a George Shivery photograph of mid-20th-century African American children staring cheerlessly out at the viewer. An effective visual substitution for the stars, the blue-tinted photograph allows the iconography of the flag to remain briefly intact before the viewer notices their absence. Amos invites the viewer to look again at this ubiquitous symbol of the American Dream and to consider the alternative history that the photograph represents. The cross in the centre is ominous, perhaps an allusion to the Confederacy’s saltire. Related to an oil painting on paper that Amos made in 1992, this print has a painterly quality that has been achieved through the thick application of ink in sweeping, imprecise lines. The result is an informal rendering of a formal symbol; an untidy, uncertain and unsettling interpretation of this emblem of national pride.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
2017 9 Mar-18 Jun, London, BM, G30, The American Dream
2020-21 8 Oct-31 Jan, Madrid, La Caixa Forum, The American Dream: pop to the present
2021 2 Mar-13 Jun, Barcelona, La Caixa Forum, The American Dream: pop to the present
2021 13 Jul-14 Nov, Zaragoza, La Caixa Forum, The American Dream: pop to the present
- Acquisition date
- 2015
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 2015,7001.1
