Faith Ringgold | Peoples Flag Show

Faith Ringgold

Peoples Flag Show 

New York City, USA: Self-published, 1970

45.7 × 61 cm.

Edition size unknown

Last week Donald Trump revived calls for demonstrators who burn American flags to be sentenced to a year in prison. 

"I happen to think if you burn an American flag, because they were burning a lot of flags in Los Angeles, I think you go to jail for one year, just automatic," he told the New York Post.

Currently flag burning is neither unlawful nor unconstitutional, but Senator Josh Hawley responded to Trump’s statements by proposing a bill that would create stiffer penalties for rioters who burned American flags. 

Stephen Radich (1922 - 2007) was a New York gallerist charged with desecrating the American flag. From 1960 to 1969, he operated the Stephen Radich Gallery, where he exhibited works by Yayoi Kusama, George Sugarman, Dmitri Hadzi and others. 

In December of 1966 he presented an exhibition of works by Marc Morrel, which incorporated American flags as a protest against the Vietnam War. Morrel, a former marine, produced soft sculptures with titles like "The United States Flag in a Yellow Noose” and "The United States Flag as a Crucified Phallus”.

The exhibition came to the attention of the New York City police, and Radich was charged and convicted of "casting contempt on the American flag”1. He was ordered to pay a fine of $500 (which would amount to almost five thousand dollars today, adjusted for inflation), or face sixty days in jail. 

At the time, Jon Hendricks was the was the director of the gallery at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. He organized an event with his Guerrilla Art Action Group collaborator Jean Toche, and Faith Ringgold. They distributed a flyer titled “Call for Work for People’s Flag Show,” writing:

“As a challenge to the repressive laws governing so-called flag desecration, concerned artists and citizens are asked to participate in an exhibition, on Nov. 9th, 1970. The exhibition will run through Nov. 14th. Artists may not retain their conspicuous silence in times such as these. All participants should please limit their contribution to one piece. The delivery date for all work is Sunday afternoon, Nov. 8… Your voice is your sole defense against repression.”

Over a hundred and fifty works were submitted to The People’s Flag Show. These included a flag baked into a cake, a flag made of commercial pop cans, and a flag in the shape of a penis. Kate Millett draped a flag over a toilet bowl. Yvonne Rainer performed a nude dance with flags, and Abbie Hoffman spoke while wearing the flag skirt that he had been arrested for two years prior. Hendricks and Toche (below) burned a flag just prior to the exhibition opening, in the church’s courtyard. 

The Attorney General ordered the exhibition closed on November 13th - only a day earlier than planned - and Hendricks, Toche and Ringgold were arrested, charged with desecration of the flag. They became known as the Judson 32, and were convicted and fined $100 each.3

"In 1970, there was a Flag Show that took place at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square Park, for which Faith designed the poster and I wrote the words.  The show, after massive participation on the part of artists in New York, was closed by the Attorney General's office.  Faith, Jon Hendricks and Jon Toche were arrested and charged with Desecration of the Flag.  As a consequence, they were dubbed the Judson 3.  They were subsequently vindicated of all charges on Appeal by lawyers who were assisted by the American Civil Liberties Union.  It was an important case for Freedom of Speech among Artists.  In this poster, Faith further  develops her increasingly sophisticated use of words and lettering in art, as well as the image of the American Flag.”

- Michele Wallace, the artist’s daughter

1. Radich appealed his conviction to the United States Supreme Court, which, in 1971, returned a tie vote. Eventually, in 1974, a federal judge overturned the conviction.

2. Jean Toche was arrested again in 1974, this time by the FBI. He was charged with mailing a kidnapping threat to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The threat, in the form of a flyer, called for the kidnapping of "museum trustees, directors, administrators, curators and benefactors”. He maintained his practice of combining mail art tactics with radical politics until his death in 2018. 

Ringgold died at her New Jersey home, on April 13, 2024, at age 93. Jon Hendricks became the world’s leading scholar on Fluxus and remains the curator and archivist for Yoko Ono. 

3. Like Radich, their fines were also overturned with support from the New York Civil Liberties Union.