Description:
A vertical print depicting the American national flag in green, orange and black.

Label Text:
In the mid-1950s Jasper Johns began painting alphabets, numbers, targets, and flags—forms, he said, “the mind already knows.” Commissioned by the Committee against the War in Vietnam, this ghoulish orange, black, and green flag has been compared to both black-and-green jungle camouflage and the orange-striped barrels used for shipping Agent Orange, which the United States used to devastate an area of Vietnam roughly the size of Massachusetts. If one stares at the white dot in the center of the image for several seconds, then turns their gaze to a blank surface, the true colors of the American flag will appear as a fleeting, hallucinatory afterimage.

-Jaime Pagana, Curatorial Assistant, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum (Sept. 2016)

Tags:
activists; civil rights; color theory; military; wars

Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=MH+2012.22

Research on objects in the collections, including provenance, is ongoing and may be incomplete. If you have additional information or would like to learn more about a particular object, please email fc-museums-web@fivecolleges.edu.

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