A digital archive of Asian/Asian American contemporary art history

Banners of Martyrs

348x40 inches (h x w x d)
1993
site-specific public installation

Rotunda, Tweed Gallery, New York City

Presentation: Office of the Mayor of the City of New York for Asian Affairs and The Asian American Arts Center. "We Count! The State of Asian Pacific America"

"The artwork is a memorial to Asian Pacific Americans who were victims of bias motivated or related killings. The information on the victims which accompanied the artwork was compiled by CAAV, Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence...

The installation comprises seven banners in the colors of the rainbow suggesting the various peoples that compose Asian Pacific Americans. The banners are four feet wide but differ in length, each one increasing by several feet at the tail end, with the smallest measuring twelve feet long by four feet wide, and the largest, thirty feet by four feet. The names of the slain, the dates of the incidents, and the states in which they took place, are transcribed across the banners in order of their occurrences.

The banners are also embellished with giant white blooms that flank these names in memory of the slain, and they are joined together at the head to a bamboo bar... It rises ten feet above the floor level to a height of thirty feet in soaring suspension towards the skylight of the rotunda."
-- Dolly Unithan

Materials

textiles

Style/Period

banners; public art
Banners of Martyrs
Source: Slide