Victoria Dugger | Freak Flags

January 28 – February 28, 2026

Sargent’s Daughters is delighted to present Freak Flags, centering on an ongoing series of mixed-media works by Victoria Dugger. Six works, each remixing the American flag through Dugger’s signature lexicon of gingham, glitter, and acrylic paint, are on view together for the first time in one exhibition. 

Dugger’s practice consistently explores the politics of embodiment, sharply speaking to experiences of Blackness, femininity, disability, and desire through maximalist compositions. In this body of work, Dugger turns away from figurative imagery, instead focusing on an iconic symbol. Each work is the exact scale of a standard American flag made to be displayed on a home flagpole. Each contains some version of stars and stripes, but their palettes range from hot pinks to lime green to black sparkles. The geometric fields are further patterned with gingham, and the sections are divided by miniature white picket fences and barbed wire. Spangled nipple tassels and pasties stand in for stars. Glimpsed between the stripes are abstracted landscapes – rolling green fields and sunset skies that the viewer is barred from accessing fully.

Dugger’s initial inspiration for the Freak Flag series came from viewing Jasper Johns’ Flag (1954-55) at MoMA in 2024. Like Johns, she was interested in the flag’s many valences – a quotidian object, a geometric composition, a revered national emblem, a site of protest. The tongue-in-cheek title references historical “freak shows,” which were at once sites of exploitation and survival for people with disabilities. 

Dugger began “Freak Flag I” on the eve of the 2024 presidential election. The works’ presentation this week is imbued with an unexpected urgency as America grapples with lethal state force being directed against its citizens, seemingly unchecked. Freak Flags asks all of us to question for whom the American flag waves.

Victoria Dugger (b. 1991, Columbus, Georgia) received her MFA in Studio & Design at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in 2022. Dugger was named the winner of the 2024 Hudgens Prize (Duluth, GA), 2023 Southern Prize for Visual Arts, and 2023 Southern Prize for Visual Arts Georgia Fellowship. Dugger was recently a resident at the MacDowell Artist Residency (Peterborough, NH) and the Lyndon House Arts Center (Athens, GA).

Dugger has had recent solo exhibitions at Sargent’s Daughters (New York, NY), Shirley Fiterman Art Center (New York, NY), Lyndon House Arts Center (Athens, GA), the Hudgens Center for Art and Learning (Duluth, GA), and Container Gallery, Columbus State University (Columbus, GA). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at JDJ Gallery (New York, NY), Kravets Wehby Gallery (New York, NY), Fierman Gallery (New York, NY), The Minnesota Museum of American Art (St. Paul, MN), Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art (Biloxi, MS), VSOP Projects (Greenpoint, NY), Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, GA), Museum of Sex (New York, NY), JEFF (Marfa, TX), Lamar Dodd School of Art (Athens, GA), and Swan Coach House Gallery (Atlanta, GA), among others. Dugger’s work has been featured in Hyperallergic, Artnet News, Artnews, Art Observed, Whitehot Magazine, Arts Atlanta, The New York Times, Burnaway, Frieze, Vogue, and artdaily; and she was included in New American Paintings 159. She is represented by Sargent’s Daughters.