Montserrat College of Art Gallery will present Jay Critchley: Democracy of the Land,
Inc., FLAGrancy, Jan. 27 – March 5, 2024, at 23 Essex Street. The exhibition features the artist’s
compelling uses of the American flag – as subject and material – drawing on the Provincetown-
based artist’s decades-long critique of patriotism, democracy and corporatism.

A public reception and performance by the artist will be held on Jan. 28 from 6-8 pm. It is free and open
to the public.

Drawing on his research and work about American symbolism, mythology, history, settler
occupation, Native Nations and ecological concerns, Jay Critchley: Democracy of the Land, Inc.,
FLAGrancy confronts our torrid and complicated history of what it means to be an American
and how control of and access to the Land defines our personal and cultural identities. The
project moves beyond “farm to table” to “Land to Land” – challenging the corporate supply
chain to return to the Land, uncontaminated, from what’s taken. The artist’s project critiques
poet Robert Frost’s unabashedly Colonialist poem The Gift Outright: “The land was ours before
we were the land’s.”

The installation will highlight Critchley’s ongoing series of modified and fabricated American
flags, recent editions fashioned with embroidered and appliqued iconic corporate logos of the
legacy of the Standard Oil Company (1882-1911).

Jay Critchley: Democracy of the Land, Inc., FLAGrancy is a continuation of Critchley’s long-term
project examining the materiality of place, employing sand, peat, fish skins, feathers, water,
motor oil, Christmas trees and gathered plastic tampon applicators washed up and gathered on
beaches. The Land and ocean he navigates are his pallet.

Since the early 1980s, Critchley has created corporate entities that provide visible platforms for
confronting the unrivaled influence and control of corporations on the ecology of the
democratic process and the Land. His TEDx Talk: “Portrait of the Artist as a Corporation”
proposes that since corporations have the rights of individuals, why can’t individuals have the
rights of corporations, such as bankruptcy protection and tax write offs?

“We must recognize the Rights of Nature and Tribal Sovereignty, to listen to the Land and let the
Land speak, in all its disparate elements, the cacophony of our relative’s voices from the
microbes to the insects to the four-legged and two legged creatures,” states the artist.
“It is patriotic to honor, celebrate and tend to the Land, but whose Land” he added.
An exhibition of this singular, multidisciplinary artist’s work, which employs sculpture,
installation, film, performance, corporate personas, architecture, writing and activism, will be
accompanied by several public programs planned during the exhibition.