Red Grooms
American, born 1937Bicentennial Bandwagon, 1976
Not on view
Serigraph (13 colors) on paper
Dimensions26 5/8 × 34 3/4 in. (67.6 × 88.3 cm)
Gift of Lorillard, 1976.7.5
Bicentennial Bandwagon is part of a portfolio that was commissioned for America’s bicentennial celebration by Lorillard Tobacco Company, maker of Kent cigarettes. Their goal was to express and to share the spirit of American independence. Artists were asked to visually respond to the question: “What does independence mean to you?” The completed portfolio was then donated to 108 museums throughout the country. Although deeply rooted in American culture, Red Grooms’s work conveys a sense of humor that borders on satire. He is well known for appropriating the forms and intense colors of comic books to create a distinctive contemporary style.
In Bicentennial Bandwagon, Grooms critiques the extreme patriotism that the 1976 bicentennial engendered by showing a cartoonish and flawed America. Though the scene, at first, appears festive, with fireworks going off in the sky, the presence of an extremely cracked Liberty Bell with the words “Equality” and “Plenty” and a high-heeled football player riding on top of it suggests that the country is not as perfect as it seems. With other unflattering caricatures of historical figures, George Washington and Betsy Ross, and racial “types” of an African American and Native American, the artist provokes more questions than an answer.
