?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
DAVID HAMMONS (1943 - ) African-American Flag.
Printed fabric stapled on a painted wooden pole, circa 1990. Flag 200x280 mm; 8x11 inches; pole 458 mm; 18 inches long. Signed and dated 1997 in ink, lower right.
Provenance: gift of the artist to Sara Penn, New York, owner of the gallery Knobkerry in Tribeca, where the artist exhibited in 1994.
The artist made a large version of this flag, over seven feet in length, as a multiple in 1990 - one famously hangs outside the Studio Museum in Harlem, and another is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. David Hammons explained "Marcus Garvey designed the African American flag, which looked like the Italian flag except that it is red, black, and green. But it is so abstract, so pure, that the masses were frightened by it. I made my flag because I felt that they needed one like the U.S. flag but with black stars instead of white ones. But then who needs stars when we have Michael Jackson." David Hammons, No Wonder, interview by Louise Neri, Parkett, no. 31 (Winter 1992), 53.
