Jarelis Calderon Photos. All artwork by Muriel Stockdale.
The gallery walls seemed to bloom with color.
Flags stretched across nearly every wall of the space, each one different from the next. Some shimmered with fabric, others beckoned, layered with intricate patterns, beads, embroidery and objects connected to the cultures they represented. In the center of the room hung the largest flag of them all, covered in traced outlines of hands. Hundreds of them overlapped across the fabric, creating a patchwork of people who had each left a small piece of themselves behind.
For artist Muriel Stockdale, whose solo exhibition E Pluribus runs at City Gallery through Sunday, the flags are more than colorful works of art. They are a way to think about identity, culture and what it means for people from different places to build a life together. For more than two decades, Stockdale has been turning those ideas into fabric compositions, creating more than 60 flags representing different cultures and collecting the stories, traditions and materials that give each one meaning.
“I love it,” Stockdale said of seeing the flags displayed together. “I’m very honored and grateful that the organization invited me to show the flags here.”
The project began more than 20 years ago, after Stockdale, an English immigrant who had lived in the United States for nearly three decades, decided to become an American citizen. At the time, she remembered, she had begun thinking more seriously about what it meant to live in the United States without being a citizen. She had always considered herself somewhat of an outsider, but she eventually realized that feeling was something she had partly created for herself.
“So I became a citizen,” Stockdale said. “And then I was in 2000.”
Stockdale’s first presidential vote as a U.S. citizen was for Al Gore, the former Vice President to President Bill Clinton. In 2000, Gore decisively won the popular vote—but lost the Electoral College (and thus the election) by five votes. The experience left Stockdale thinking about politics, citizenship and the meaning of being part of a country.
A few years later, as the United States prepared for the Iraq War, she watched people in New York City wave American flags in support of the war.
Jarelis Calderon Photos. All artwork by Muriel Stockdale.
Stockdale had recently studied the Constitution and other documents connected to the country’s history. To her, the flag represented something different. “The meaning of the flag is not, ‘Let’s go to war,’” she said. “It means, ‘Let’s come together, let's build this community as diverse different people.” That thought became the beginning of her flag project.
Instead of standing on what she called a “soapbox” and telling people they were misunderstanding the flag, Stockdale decided to make her own. She began creating flags that represented different cultures, using materials, patterns and objects connected to each one.
“I just had this idea pop into my head,” she said. “Let’s just honor each culture that I can figure out a flag for.” She has been doing it ever since.
Stockdale has now created more than 60 flags, nearly half of which have been sold. Sixteen are permanently displayed in New York City at 315 Hudson St., an office building that houses Google. Where she can, she uses materials specific to a culture, from a Malian wedding blanket and beads to the Huipiles worn, embroidered and sold by Indigenous women in Mexico, particularly Oaxaca.
But there are still cultures she has not figured out how to represent.
Jarelis Calderon Photos. All artwork by Muriel Stockdale.
The Dominican Republic is one example. Stockdale explained that she loves visiting the country and has thought about creating a flag for it, but she has not yet found the right material or design. When she once asked Dominican children what they thought should go on a flag, they suggested flowers.
Now she has another challenge: figuring out how to make flowers that will last.
The uncertainty is part of Stockdale’s process. There is no single formula for making a flag. Instead, each one develops through research, experimentation and sometimes pure coincidence.
For one Nigerian flag, Stockdale used colorful fabric traditionally used for head wraps. She discovered it while shopping in New York City’s fabric district. “I said to the guy, ‘What’s that for?” she recalled. “And he said, ‘Oh that’s what the Nigerian market for head wraps.’” Stockdale immediately knew she wanted to use it.
The discovery of the Nigerian fabric was one of many unexpected moments that shaped Stockdale’s process. Sometimes, finding the right material requires research and planning. Other times, it comes down to simply being in the right place at the right time. That happened when Stockdale was creating a Russian flag. She wanted to use small Matryoshka dolls as the stars, but after searching throughout New York and online, she could only find a few.
Then, while visiting her sister-in-law in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she happened to see a child walking down the street carrying a bundle of Matryoshka doll keychains. “I was like, do you have 50?” Stockdale recalled. The child directed her to his father’s shop, where she was able to get the dolls she needed.
Stories like that are part of what makes each flag personal to Stockdale. The materials aren’t chosen simply because they look beautiful; they often carry something about the culture they represent. Her England flag, for example, is especially meaningful because her mother embroidered it. Another flag represents Poland in honor of her in-laws and uses Kashubian embroidery, a traditional style from northeastern Poland. Some pieces take months to complete, while others may come together within a few days.
Stockdale has learned that the longer she works on the project, the more she discovers about the cultures she represents. “There are a lot of stories behind all of these projects," she said. “I’ve learned a lot of interesting things about different cultures.”
Those stories aren’t always connected to countries with clear borders. Stockdale also wants her work to recognize cultures and communities that don’t have their own country, including groups such as the Kurds and Rohingya. “I like that they can come here and still hold on to their own culture. Honor it and be who they are.”
That idea of belonging is especially visible in the largest flag in the center of the gallery.
The flag is actually Stockdale’s second version of the piece. The original was commissioned by Trinity Wall Street in New York City to commemorate the 10th anniversary of September 11. People from the surrounding community, tourists and others were invited to trace their hands and contribute to the flag.
Years later the original piece could no longer be found. Rather than allowing the work to disappear, Stockdale decided to recreate it.
Beginning in May 2025, she spent roughly six months rebuilding the flag, collecting hand tracings from nearly 1,000 people along the way. She asked members of arts organizations, people she knew and complete strangers to participate. At one point, she even set up a table at a community event and asked people passing by for their hand tracings.
For Stockdale, collecting those hands was meaningful in another way. She described herself as having once been extremely shy, and approaching strangers was something she had not always been comfortable doing.
“It was kind of the last vestige of that shy gene being required to step out into the world,” she said.
She eventually finished the flag toward the end of 2025. Stockdale calls the project a “proxy action,” an act that allows someone to work through a problem indirectly. She compared it to folding towels after an argument with someone: while doing something simple, the mind can begin working through the conflict.
For the hand flag, that idea became much larger. “This is my proxy action to restitch the United States of America,” Stockdale said.
Nearly 1,000 people have now left their handprints on the piece, along with their names, cultures and backgrounds. Together, their individual contributions form one large work.
“All of us are coming together again,” Stockdale said. “Because we're coming together to make life better together as a group.”
Jarelis Calderon Photos. All artwork by Muriel Stockdale.
The flags are only part of Stockdale's creative life.
Before focusing on the project, she spent more than 30 years working in costume design for theatre, film and television. She worked on productions including “Law & Order” and “The Equalizer,” and spent years working with the Muppets, creating clothing for characters including Miss Piggy and Kermit.
Her interests in storytelling eventually led her to writing. Stockdale wrote a science-fiction screenplay in 2000 and later turned the story into her novel, “Gabriel Born,” which she published in 2014. The story follows a woman who attempts to alter her genes to save herself from a debilitating disease, only to discover that her child has developed extraordinary abilities. Stockdale added that she wanted to create science fiction that focused less on weapons and more on consciousness and human potential.
Now, she has more ideas waiting for her. Stockdale plans to continue making flags, including one using papyrus from Egypt. She is also working on a television series about two young women for Martinique in the late 1700s who are predicted to become empresses.
For Stockdale, there doesn't seem to be much separation between her different creative pursuits. Whether she is sewing a flag, designing a costume, writing a novel or developing a television series, she continues to build stories around people and their identities.
Back in the gallery, those stories surround visitors from every wall. The flags are different in color, material and meaning, but together they return to the same idea that inspired Stockdale’s work more than two decades ago: that people from different backgrounds can bring their individual histories together to create something shared.
E Pluribus runs at City Gallery, located at 994 State St., New Haven, through August 23. Visit the gallery Friday through Sunday, 12 p.m. - 4 p.m. or by appointment. A rising senior at Wilbur Cross High School, Jarelis Calderon is an alumna of the 2025 summer cohort of the Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI). YAJI is a program in which New Haven, Hamden and West Haven Public Schools high school students pitch, write, edit and publish articles through the Arts Paper.