ART CITIES:N.York-Vaughn Spann

Inside the cavernous white rooms of Almine Rech’s Tribeca space, the American flag does not flutter with patriotic ease. In Vaughn Spann’s latest solo exhibition, “(All) Americans,” the flag hangs heavy—mutated, burdened, and accusatory. The exhibition, Spann’s sixth with the gallery, transforms one of the most recognizable national symbols into an unstable site of grief, exclusion, and contested belonging.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Almine Rech Gallery Archive

“(All) Americans” arrives at a moment when questions surrounding citizenship, nationalism, and racial identity in the United States feel increasingly volatile. Rather than offering resolution, Spann intensifies the contradiction embedded in the American project itself. The exhibition’s central provocation—“Whose Home?”—echoes through every work like an unresolved refrain. (

That question is sharpened by the exhibition’s accompanying text from critic and curator Seph Rodney, who revisits “The Star-Spangled Banner” not as a patriotic hymn, but as a series of open-ended questions. Rodney notes the historical irony that Crispus Attucks—a Black and Indigenous man—was among the first casualties of the American Revolution, even as contemporary nationalist rhetoric often attempts to erase non-White citizens and immigrants from the nation’s foundational mythology. Spann’s work inhabits that fracture directly.

For Spann, the American flag has never functioned as a neutral emblem. He describes it as “jarring,” a symbol that simultaneously promises liberty while historically withholding protection from Black Americans. His paintings emerge from a deeply personal understanding of displacement and conditional belonging. Born in Florida and now working between Maplewood and East Orange, New Jersey, Spann often mines autobiography through abstraction, layering material experimentation with social critique.

The emotional center of the exhibition is “America (In White),” a monumental reimagining of the Stars and Stripes that refuses celebratory nationalism. The upper portion resembles the familiar American flag: blue canton, white stars, red stripes. But beneath it, the composition expands into an unsettling field of white textured formations built from terry cloth, polymer paint, sand, and resin. The material accumulations resemble scar tissue, burial mounds, or sedimentary remains. Red flecks interrupt the whiteness like traces of violence surfacing through denial.

The work’s brilliance lies in its ambiguity. At first glance, the monochromatic lower half appears minimal and restrained. Yet the longer one stands before it, the more oppressive the whiteness becomes. Spann converts absence into structure. White ceases to signify neutrality and instead becomes an architecture of exclusion—a visual system built upon erasure.

In doing so, Spann enters a powerful lineage of American artists who have dismantled and reconstructed the flag as both object and ideology. The exhibition recalls the confrontational symbolism of David Hammons, the political urgency of Dread Scott, and the narrative interventions of Faith Ringgold. Yet Spann’s contribution feels distinctly contemporary. His flags are not merely critiques of nationalism; they are psychological landscapes shaped by alienation and inherited instability.

There is also a profound material intelligence in the work. Spann’s use of unconventional surfaces and sculptural textures destabilizes the flatness traditionally associated with flag imagery. The paintings push beyond representation into objecthood, confronting viewers physically rather than symbolically. These are not images to salute. They are barriers, memorials, warnings.

The installation itself amplifies this tension. The sparsity of the gallery allows each work to operate almost like a civic monument stripped of ceremony. The silence surrounding the paintings feels deliberate, forcing viewers into direct confrontation with the contradictions embedded in the symbol. In Spann’s hands, the flag becomes less a marker of unity than evidence of an unfinished national reckoning.

What makes “(All) Americans” especially compelling is that it resists easy binaries. Spann does not reject the flag outright, nor does he surrender it to nationalism. Instead, he occupies its unresolved space. He “recharges the symbols,” as he has described, forcing them to bear the weight of histories they were designed to obscure.

Photo: Vaughn Spann, America (Redacted No. 2), 2026, Polymer paint, mixed media, canvas on wood panel, 76.8 x 103.5 x 7 cm – 30 1/4 x 40 3/4 x 2 3/4 in (unframed), 83.8 x 109.6 x 9.5 cm – 33 x 43 1/4 x 3 3/4 in (framed), © Vaughn Spann, Courtesy the artist and Almine Rech Gallery

Info: Almine Rech Gallery, 361 Broadway, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 8/5-13/6/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.alminerech.com/