Our Political Flags Collection | Ultimate Flags Store includes a wide variety of hand-painted and digitally printed flags, each made to your exact specifications. We use a dye sublimation process that doesn’t just print a design; it literally fuses it to the fibers of your chosen fabric. This creates a long-lasting, fade-resistant flag that’s truly a work of art. The result is a flag that’s as beautiful to look at as it is to hold, with colors that are vibrant and enduring, even after years of unfurling in the sun and wind.
The election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton may have been one of the nastiest in American history, but it was hardly the first. A new exhibition at UConn’s William Benton Museum of Art shows how presidential campaigns used flags to promote candidates and advance ideas more than a century ago.
Making a Statement: Political Flags Collection
Mark Shenkman ’65 (CLAS), H ’07, an avid collector of American campaign textiles, donated the show. Featuring rare presidential flags from 1815 to 1912, it’s an opportunity to see how political themes of reform, prosperity and patriotism were conveyed with a mix of recognizable imagery and obscure symbolism.
The exhibition also highlights the evolution of campaign flags, showing how their designs shifted from off-hand adaptations to more official emblems. For example, the red flag with a star to symbolize the party and hammer and sickle to represent workers and farmers became the official emblem of the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution in 1917 and remained the Communist Party’s official emblem until 1991.