It’s a layered choice, to be sure.
Spoleto Festival USA on May 18 unveiled its annual festival poster, which this year features an image of Three Flags, the 1958 encaustic-on-paper work by South Carolina-raised Jasper Johns.
“You look at it, you see something deeply familiar, the American flag, but I think Jasper Johns invites us to look again,” said Spoleto General Director and CEO Mena Mark Hanna at the entrance stairs of Gibbes Museum of Art. A sudden breeze serendipitously swept away the black cloth from the easel to reveal the work to the delight of the crowd gathered there.
“There’s layering, there’s perspective, there’s texture, there’s scale, and he transforms this national symbol into something that has a questioning dynamic that is open to interpretation, that is about the freedom of expression.”
That layering starts with the artist’s visual approach. The work, which is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, literally layers the likenesses of three American flags, with canvas stacked atop another in diminishing dimensions.
Flagging the 250th
Then there are other layers to this ingenious pick of a poster.
The 2026 festival takes place as the nation heads into its 250th commemoration of the American Revolution. The celebration has been curated with a thematic link to the freedom of expression that is among this country’s fundamental precepts.
In 1791, the First Amendment of the United States Constitution protected freedom of expression, encompassing speech, religion, the press, and even the burning of the very emblem dreamed up to unify all citizens.
This American embrace freedom of expression is on 2026 Spoleto program, from the theatrical work George + George, which offers a comedic romp through the American Revolution, to An Evening with Ken Burns, a celebration of America at 250 that blends conversation, music, and imagery to explore the ideals, struggles, and contradictions of the American Revolution.
Whether the revolution is on the stage, every festival production is a window into unbridled artistic expression made possible by the express commitment of the crafters of the constitution.
Posters on King Street
The festival has plans to gain maximum exposure for this year’s poster. At the March 31 meeting of the King Street BID (the King Street business improvement district), Hanna gave proprietors a sneak peak.
The festival’s aim is to ramp up its tradition of inviting King Street storefronts to create window displays around the annual festival poster. Shops are known to celebrate the chosen work of art in ways that align with the business’s wares and its style.
In recent years, the initiative has yielded only a few stalwarts, among them Croghan’s Jewel Box and Hampden. This year, Spoleto is committed to amplifying it once more, even dangling incentivizing tickets to sold-out festival events for winning windows.
At the meeting, Hanna offered rousing remarks on this convergence of creativity, community and commerce – and how characteristic of Charleston this confluence is, particularly on its King Street corridor.
To date, 35 businesses are confirmed, posters in hand. So we will soon see King Street gussied up in red, white and blue for the festival, teeing up also Charleston 250 celebrations as only Charleston can: with an eye on the arts that have long informed this city.
Raising flags
Johns sure knows how to pick his symbols.
With his flags, he set out to explore “things the mind already knows.” The artist did so with targets, letters and numbers, too. As with many of his works, his visual tactics prompt cognitive dissonance. Your eye ricochets from perceived dimensions, skittering from the stripes of one or the stars on the next. This forces you to take pause, to revisit and rethink what you are seeing.
At a post-announcement conversation between Hanna and Dr. Alex Rich, president and CEO of the Gibbes, delved deep into the work, and its abiding resonance and how both its physical makeup and its impression has changed with the times, from its origins during McCarthyism to our present-day national tumult.
“No matter where your political leaning is, right, flying a flag today does seem to be a statement that can be interpreted in all different ways,” Rich said, reflecting that it is “amazing to arrive at this moment in America …. where there are questions surrounding the multiple interpretations even of the flag in its most standard form.”
In our divisive times, the flag continues to flap, loud and insistent, leveraged by both sparring sides in jingoistic brandishings or protestation burnings. Still, through Johns’ elegant, unparalleled eye, its encaustic layering of color and texture renders it warm, its homespun quality renders it all the more human, hardly the source of potential invective. Such foment was by no means the intention of the artist.
What’s more, a potent symbol in the hands of an artist can pose layered questions, rather than make unbreachable statements.
Hanna observed, “This work asks us not only what we see but how we see and how we look at these things to take an established American symbol and reframe it through old artistic inquiry.”
So let the players play, the posters parade and the questions fly. Spoleto Festival USA, now manifest in a timely new look at an iconic American work, has begun.
The 2026 Festival poster is now on sale at shop.spoleto.org.
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