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    Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Hugh Steers, Flag, Megaphone, 1992
    Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Hugh Steers, Flag, Megaphone, 1992
    Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Hugh Steers, Flag, Megaphone, 1992
    Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Hugh Steers, Flag, Megaphone, 1992
    Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Hugh Steers, Flag, Megaphone, 1992
    Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Hugh Steers, Flag, Megaphone, 1992

    Hugh Steers

    Flag, Megaphone, 1992
    Oil on canvas
    72 x 58 1/8 in (182.88 x 147.64 cm)
    73 3/4 x 59 7/8 x 2 3/8 in framed (187.3 x 152.1 x 6 cm framed)
    EHS256

    Further images

    • (View a larger image of thumbnail 1 ) Hugh Steers, Flag, Megaphone, 1992
    • (View a larger image of thumbnail 2 ) Hugh Steers, Flag, Megaphone, 1992
    • (View a larger image of thumbnail 3 ) Hugh Steers, Flag, Megaphone, 1992
    • (View a larger image of thumbnail 4 ) Hugh Steers, Flag, Megaphone, 1992
    • (View a larger image of thumbnail 5 ) Hugh Steers, Flag, Megaphone, 1992
    • (View a larger image of thumbnail 6 ) Hugh Steers, Flag, Megaphone, 1992
    Diagnosed in 1987 with HIV, Steers’s subject matter often speaks to the experience of living through an evolving Queer identity and the devastating AIDS crisis. Steers maintained a commitment to...
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    Diagnosed in 1987 with HIV, Steers’s subject matter often speaks to the experience of living through an evolving Queer identity and the devastating AIDS crisis. Steers maintained a commitment to figuration throughout his career, cut dramatically short by AIDS at the age of 32. Flag, Megaphone (1992) marks a departure from Steers’s usual domestic scenes. Alluding to the US government’s inaction in the wake of the AIDS crisis, the image features a seated man perched on a blank tv, which broadcasts nothing, contemplating an American flag-festooned megaphone and microphone, which amplify silence. Speaking to Steers’s own frustration with the national response to AIDS—in 1991, he wrote an outraged letter to President Bush for declining to appear at the Sixth National AIDS Conference and going instead to a fundraising event for the homophobic senator Jesse Helms—the image marks one of Steers’s more overt political statements.
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    Provenance

    Estate of Hugh Steers

    Exhibitions

    2021: Hugh Steers: Strange State of Being, Alexander Gray Associates, New York

    Literature

    Trout, Hank. “A Strange State of Being.” A&U Magazine, March 15, 2021.

    Publications

    Schröder, Barbara and Karen Kelly, eds. Hugh Steers: The Complete Paintings, 1983-1994. New York: Visual AIDS, 2015, pp. 143, 225.

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