Sean-Kierre Lyons’s Flower Warriors and Cracker Flags

Drop in Water, 2017, crackers, acrylic, and resin.
If, in the winter of 2017, you had walked along Gates Avenue—which stretches from Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, to Fresh Pond, Queens—you would have found its midpoint conspicuously marked by a version of the Confederate flag. The migratory art gallery Housing, then located in Bedford-Stuyvesant, had recently installed Sean-Kierre Lyons’s Drop in Water (2017) in its storefront window. Like most of Lyons’s works, the flag was a