New Work From the Artist Behind the Covid Flags on the Mall

In the fall of 2021, Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg blanketed a 20-acre portion of the National Mall with more than 700,000 tiny white flags as part of an installation called “In America: Remember.” Each represented a life lost to the coronavirus—a stark illustration of the cost of Covid-19 up to that point. The emotional piece drew attention around the world.

Now Firstenberg is at work on her next DC project, and this time she’s drawing attention to a different crisis: gun violence. “It’s the leading cause of death for children in the United States, and it makes no sense that we’re at a stalemate on something that’s so important,” says the artist, who works out of a studio in Bethesda. The new piece, “Alienable Right to Life,” will be on display at Freedom Plaza from May 10 through May 20.

Much like the Covid installation, this gun-violence project is, at its heart, a form of data visualization. It features an American flag—about 30 feet wide and stretched across scaffolding—which bears the names of more than 1,000 victims. The goal is for viewers to grasp the sheer number of lives lost to firearms. Firstenberg tried to include the names of people killed in every mass shooting since Columbine in 1999, although she’s excluding ones in which victims knew the perpetrator, such as those related to gangs or domestic violence. “These are people who had absolutely no way of knowing that was their last day,” she says. “They were mowed down in public places.”

In addition to the names on the flag, “Alienable Right to Life” makes use of a large-scale rendition of the Declaration of Independence that highlights Americans’ “unalienable right” to life. “With each name I add, I become more angry, because people’s lives have been taken away through no act of their own,” says Firstenberg. “These lives have been taken because politicians didn’t have enough courage to do the right thing.” When the piece is installed in Freedom Plaza, there will be another visual element: a view of the actual US Capitol in the distance.

“Alienable Right to Life” started as a much smaller piece, which Firstenberg first displayed at a DC gallery in 2019. During the unveiling ceremony, phones started pinging with notifications about a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso. Firstenberg later added those names while the work was still hanging on the gallery wall. Since then, many more victims have joined the names on the flag. As Firstenberg prepares the full-size version for its debut at Freedom Plaza, she’s aware of a grim fact: There may be people out there right now who have no idea they’re about to become part of it.

This article appears in the April 2024 issue of Washingtonian.