Story at a glance
- The “In America: Remember” exhibit is planting more than 610,000 white flags on 20 acres of the National Mall.
- Visitors are invited to personalize the small flags for those they have lost during the pandemic.
- The exhibit will be the largest participatory installation on the National Mall since the AIDS quilt draped the area nearly four decades ago.
Hundreds of thousands of white flags will be planted on the National Mall for several weeks in September as part of a public installation commemorating the Americans who have died from COVID-19.
The “In America: Remember” exhibit will feature more than 610,000 white flags on 20 acres near the Washington Monument and the National Museum of African and African American History and Culture from Sept. 17 through Oct 3.
Visitors are allowed to personalize the flags in honor of someone they have lost during the pandemic. Those who are unable to visit can dedicate a flag to someone they lost to COVID-19 via the exhibit’s website.
Volunteers will hand write the message on the flag and a digital version of the message will appear on the exhibit’s website.
The project was created by Maryland artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg, who carried out the first iteration of “In America” last fall. More than 267,000 white flags were planted on four acres outside RFK Stadium. The exhibition ran out of space due to the mounting death toll.
“This fall as employers bring workers back to office buildings and students return to school, it will be too easy to ‘go back to normal,” Firstenberg said in a release.
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“But for one in three American families, there is no normal. This exhibit honors all who have died, but it is more than an act of remembrance. In America: Remember, will provide an historic visual reminding us for years to come that being an American means caring for all Americans. We cannot let this ever happen again,” she said.
The exhibit will be the largest participatory installation on the National Mall since the AIDS quilt draped the area nearly four decades ago. Last October, for the National COVID-19 Day of Remembrance, 20,000 empty chairs lined the National Mall, each representing just a fraction of the American lives lost due to the coronavirus pandemic.
More than 608,000 Americans have lost their lives over the course of the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
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