At the Independent this weekend, David Platzker’s Specific Objects and Marian Goodman Gallery are showing a selection of artist banners from the Betsy Ross Flag & Banner Company. Additional banners are at the gallery in Tribeca, and there’s also a print publication where Platzker pulls together the history of the artist banner project, from a Madison Avenue art gallery’s attempt to advertise shows during the city’s newspaper strike in 1963; to an immediately successful traveling exhibition organized with the American Federation of Arts; to the founding of Multiples, Inc. to publish artist editions in non-banner formats; and eventually to Marian Goodman founding her own gallery.
Roy Lichtenstein’s Night Seascape (1966) [above] is from Betsy Ross’s breakthrough era, when artists were creating works specifically for the banner medium.
Platzker documents 95 banners made over a decade, but one of his most remarkable finds is from the beginning, the Betsy Ross debut show at Graham Gallery in June 1963. It is a 7-foot banner by Andy Warhol, a 5.5-foot wide screenprint on nylon of a 1960 Richard Nixon presidential campaign button with Nixon’s wife Pat, and it was completely unknown and undocumented in Warhol’s oeuvre.
Nixon’s campaign organized a whole Pat for First Lady Week in October 1960. Platzker notes that “Nixon, having lost to Kennedy and then to Pat Brown in the 1962 California gubernatorial election, had recently moved to the Upper East Side,” started work as a corporate lawyer, and told the press, “he was never going to run for political office again.” So in the midst of Camelot, just months after Jackie had enlisted Mark Rothko and Franz Kline to help bring the Mona Lisa to the Met, Warhol was making a giant reminder of what might have been. And the Nixons might have seen it.
After the Graham Gallery, the AFA sent the show, Banners USA, on a two-year national tour. On November 22, 1963, it was on view at East Tennessee State University, its second of fourteen stops.