For Which It Stands…

For Which It Stands… examined the American flag as a contested image at Fairfield University Art Museum from January 23 to July 25, 2026. Curated by Carey Mack Weber, the exhibition occupied both the Bellarmine Hall Galleries and Walsh Gallery. Its seventy-five works ranged from Childe Hassam’s flag-filled painting Italian Day, May 1918 to a textile sculpture commissioned from Maria de Los Angeles. Shepard Fairey’s contribution was documented specifically in Walsh Gallery.

The museum’s label identifies American Rage, dated 2020, as an offset lithograph on Speckletone paper from its own collection. That medium should remain attached to this exhibited object. Other versions of American Rage exist, including a screen-print edition described on Fairey’s website, but the specifications of one version cannot be transferred automatically to another.

The image draws on a photograph by Ted Soqui and depicts a figure whose lower face is covered by an American-flag bandana. Fairey’s account of the project links it to protest against police violence and to his belief that challenging injustice can be a patriotic act. At Fairfield, the flag therefore appeared both as a recognizable national sign and as something worn on a particular person’s body. It could function as concealment, assertion or protection, opening several possible readings within a single portrait.

Other works in the museum’s published Walsh labels complicated the flag through changes in materials and presentation. David Hammons’s African American Flag recomposed its colors; Richard Klein’s Transparency assembled glass objects into a flag; Glenn Ligon’s Untitled pictured a crumpled flag in a bucket. Those examples suggest how much can change while the underlying emblem remains identifiable. Fairey’s graphic treatment belongs to that broader question of recognition and revision.

Presented within Fairfield’s America250 initiative, the exhibition asked who can claim the flag and whose experiences its familiar design might fail to acknowledge. Its anniversary setting did not settle those questions in advance. Instead, the span of works allowed celebration, criticism and demands for inclusion to occupy the same discussion. American Rage offered a pointed entry into that discussion because the national symbol did not hover above the individual: it was entangled with the person the viewer encountered. The exhibition closed on July 25, a date subsequently confirmed in the university’s September report.