Bucks County artist creates collaborative, interactive Juneteenth flag

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Kevin Aster Young collaborated with 16 different organizations and faith institutions in Bucks County to create a giant, interactive artwork depicting the Juneteenth flag.

The piece, titled “Forward Backward Together Forward (160 Years),” will be on display Saturday at the Mercer Museum as part of its fourth annual Juneteenth celebration.

Young, who is also co-founder and co-lead of the Bucks County Antiracism Coalition, helped jumpstart the Juneteenth celebrations at the Mercer Museum in Doylestown in 2021 and is co-organizer of the event. An artist and activist, Young has also created artwork each year to commemorate the holiday.

Young said for this year’s piece, he knew he wanted to do something collaborative that would involve local residents and mark a “milestone”: the 160th anniversary of Juneteenth.

The artist chose 16 local organizations and faith-based institutions that “work in the spirit of the holiday.” He sent each one 10 canvases, along with painting materials and instructions on which colors needed to go where on each tile. Apart from color placement, Young said that members of each organization could then decorate and express themselves however they wanted while painting each tile.

Young then strung the tiles together in 10 rows of 16 tiles to display them on metal spindles enclosed in a structure he built out of wood and aluminum. The result is a mosaic of color depicting the Juneteenth flag.

“I find that it’s not only a great way to engage the community, it’s not only a great way to get people exploring their creative side, but for me as an artist, I basically set the stage, and then I kind of just watch it unfold,” he said. “Relinquishing that control a little bit, and letting people discover their voice through what I’ve provided for them, it gives the work a kind of life that I on my own wouldn’t be able to do, right? … And I think that’s a good metaphor for community involvement, right? So if we all come together, if we all pitch in, and everybody lends a hand, everybody lends their ideas … we come away a whole that’s more than the sum of its parts.”

On the back of every square, Young placed a QR code leading to information about what was happening in the Black experience during each of the 160 years since the first Juneteenth.

The education piece of the artwork, he said, was key.

“This piece was intentionally educational,” Young said. “I wanted to not only create something that I and the people who added to this project thought was beautiful, but I also wanted to create something that people could learn from. They could take something away from it.”

Young said that the process of educating and looking back on the history of the struggle for racial equity and racial justice is “vital” now, especially as President Donald Trump’s administration has attacked diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

“Whenever there’s been any significant progress for Black Americans in this country, we see a backlash,” Young said, noting that the title of the piece, “Forward Backward Together Forward,” references that pattern. “In the research that I did to come up with all these years and articles, I noticed that it’s a repeating pattern. For every advance there’s efforts to kind of curtail that. And I think we are living that now. We are very much in that process. That said, it gives me hope when I look to the past and I see that, OK, this isn’t new. This has happened before, and we’ve come through it before, and we’ve come through it stronger and more united as a country.”

Young said art, to him, plays an important role in remembering history in a “visceral” way, especially the history of slavery and Black Americans’ struggle for racial justice and racial equity in the United States. The artist said the flag and its representation of the past 160 years shows how little time has passed since the end of slavery.

“When you say 160 years, it sounds like forever ago,” he said. “But then you see it visually in front of you. Each of these is a year, and it’s not a whole lot of time. And that’s important because we like to think that the civil rights era was so long ago, and Reconstruction was so long ago, and it really wasn’t that long ago. It just underscores that we’re still dealing with some of the things that were never corrected from slavery, and when you say slavery, it sounds ancient, but it wasn’t ancient.”

The flag will be on display at the Mercer Museum on Saturday. After the event, the artwork will go to Pebble Hill Church in Doylestown on a temporary basis. Young said he is working on finding a permanent home for the piece.