Benny Andrews attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1954 to 1958 on the G.I. Bill. Upon graduating, he moved to New York, where he began agitating for black artists to be represented at major museums in the city. A cofounder of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) in 1969, Andrews was increasingly categorized as a “protest artist.”

Flag Day can be read as a harbinger of two later projects—a program Andrews organized through the BECC to teach art to inmates in New York City prisons, and a large body of work from the early 1970s he made to mark America’s bicentennial. This intimately scaled, potent painting shows a black man imprisoned by the “bars” of the American flag.