Between Flagships

- by Ronen Gamil

Between Flagships

Artist: Ronen Gamil

2022

fabric, steel, concrete

Location: Village Green (where Broad St. meets Elm St.)

This colorful textile installation celebrates the individual paths taken to a central meeting place. Drawing on current census data, the artist chose colors, shapes, and patterns from twenty flags corresponding to the ancestry of Summit residents whose families migrated to the United States, some several generations ago, others more recently. Each panel incorporates features drawn from two or more flags to reference how our shared identities become blended over time and through generations.

A Brooklyn native, Ronen Gamil was raised in Israel and has lived and traveled extensively in Italy, Spain, and South America. Trained in art and architecture, he earned a BA and Master of Urban Planning from the City College of New York. His work has been exhibited at FiveMyles and Prospect Park in Brooklyn and Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens. He currently works as a Gardener-Curator at Brooklyn Botanic Garden and was recently named a 2022 AIM Fellow at the Bronx Museum of Art.

Gamil says he is driven to create “immersive, contemplative” works like “Between Flagships” that engage the viewer’s senses while drawing attention to the experiences of underrepresented groups like migrants and the issue of class inequity.

Each of the three paths in “Between Flagships” is bound on both sides by three panels of sewn fabrics connected to a thin metal grid. Some are taller and some shorter so that their height “intentionally limits views outwards in relation to ideas about being seen by others, seeing others, and being in between on several levels physically and socially.” This effect is meant to evoke an experience common to all migrants—the feeling of being between two worlds.