DATE POSTED: JUN 18, 2024.

^{All the images in this dispatch were taken (and generously shared) by photographer Bruce Guthrie.}

At the concluding event of Rituals in the Making’s pandemic reflection series on Thursday, March 7, 2024, team members made their way from Foggy Bottom to Bethesda, Maryland. There, we paid a visit to Suzanne Firstenberg’s studio, which houses 20,000 flags from the In America: Remember art installation, each bearing a memorial inscription. 

In the year since we began to transcribe the thousands of flags with written dedications, we have had to be flexible in our approach to account for the following categories: 

1. flags from the 2020 installation, In America: How Could This Happen … held at RFK stadium 

2. In America: Remember (IAR) flags with dedications submitted online, written by volunteers 

3. IAR flags that were registered and handwritten by loved ones on-site at the installation 

4. IAR flags that were un-registered and handwritten by loved ones one-site at the installation 

RIM team members sign up to transcribe the flags when we have the time, locating the photos and correct spreadsheets scattered across our databases. 

Professor Sarah Wagner, Professor Richard Grinker, Paige Gavin, Maura Kelly-Yuoh, and Emmy Numann were able to meet with the dedicated volunteers who have been heavily involved with cleaning and transcribing the flags (see our previous dispatches on cleaning and storing; and “sleuthing”). It gave us a chance to check back in with the process of transcribing, which had taken a temporary back-seat to our work preparing for the seminar series. 

During this first publicly accessible visit, the studio opened its space for the volunteers from the installation to gather together during the first week of March, a time that is now held sacred by those who have lost a loved one to the pandemic or who have been diagnosed with Long COVID. The group included individuals who took photographs of each flag for transcriptions and longevity, placed flags onto the National Mall, and handwrote submitted dedications, many among them mourners themselves. 

As people entered the studio on that day in March 2024, they were immediately greeted by a wooden structure, built in the form of curve or wave, that served as a platform to display approximately 100 of the dedicated flags. Nearby, shelves were stacked with long, white boxes that contained the rest of installation flags—all 20,000 of them. In opening up the studio, Suzanne also wanted people to get a glimpse, a reminder, of the emotional force of the flags with their individual inscriptions. 

Suzanne showed multiple screenings of Jamie Meltzer’s short, not even for a moment do things stand still, throughout the event. The short featured families who agreed to wear microphones and filmed by the documentary crew as they placed the flag dedicated to their loved one on the National Mall. With no accompanying score, the short featured the families talking and supporting each other and captured the immense sound of hundreds of thousands of flags blowing in the wind during a picturesque autumn in the nation’s capital. The screenings invited studio visitors to reflect on and share their own experiences and impressions at the installation. 

Listening to the personal connections that the volunteers had to the installation, as well as their anecdotes during their two weeks of work back in 2021, gave our own team members another moment, of which there can never be too many, to reflect on the work of flag transcriptions. The importance of each flag is never lost on us.