New Glory
(a.k.a. Italian-American Flag)
cause: GLOBAL RELATIONS
now benefiting: Global Education Associates

The tale behind this seemingly silly work begins with a story of a tortoise and a hare. I actually experienced an Aesop's fable for a while, having Tikal and Beastie live at my place on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Being box-trained, Beastie enjoyed the full run of the place until he caused trouble in the kitchen. To prevent his entry, a makeshift stretcher from the studio was pieced together with a scrap of checkered tablecloth and placed in the kitchen doorway.

While observing Beastie's reaction to the obstacle, I realized that both the stretcher's proportions and the cloth's design echoed elements of Jasper Johns' flag paintings. So, a new stretcher was fashioned to further emphasize the associations with the American flag. However, the horizontal stripes (seven red and six white) are overlapped by nine vertical stripes in the tablecloth design. Also, the fifty white stars on a field of blue were substituted by a map of Italy (including Sardinia and Sicily) on a sea of blue. One might say that this work was inspired by a harebrained idea.