about the 99 Flags series

New Shades of Old Glory™ is an original series of 99 flag-themed monoprints by artist Marodeen Ebrahimzadeh. Each monoprint is being reproduced on 100% rag paper in editions of giclée prints and artist proofs in two different sizes.  New flag prints from the series will be added each month until all 99 flags have been released.

For inquiries and questions, please email us at: ask@99flags.com

the journey of New Shades of Old Glory™

I was born in the city of Abadán, located in the southwest region of Iran, and was the youngest of seven children raised in an Assyrian Christian family. As a child, I remember having three toys:  an airplane made of alloy, a rubber tractor that was missing the head of the driver, and a beautiful western style, gold colored cowboy gun with a black handle.

I was mesmerized by old black and white movies.  My favorite actor was John Wayne, who was larger than life and seemed to fill the screen. Wayne often played a lawman wearing a shiny Marshal’s star badge, and was always the hero leading the cavalry, with flags flying as they were off to rescue someone. I would later use the shape of this Marshal star in my flag prints. These are the images that filled my head as a child, and it is where the concept of creating my flag was born. I needed to make this flag, but no one in Iran could really understand why.

When I turned 16, my father retired and we moved to Tehran, the capital city of Iran.  At that time in Iran, after graduating high school in 1969,  I had to choose either to attend the university (after passing an exam) or complete two years of required military service.  My parents wanted me to join my four brothers in Germany, but I was very independent and chose the military. After completing my service in 1971, I attended the College of Fine Arts.  At the same time I started an interior design business, and for the first time traveled outside of Iran to visit my brothers in Germany. While there, the Iranian revolution began and seeing what was happening at home, I knew I could not go back to my home country.  I felt my options were to stay in Germany or go to the U.S. – John Wayne country. The choice was easy, and in 1978 I came to America, where upon arriving in New York City, I walked out of the airport and saw flags flying everywhere.  I was certain I would see John Wayne next!

I settled in Rancho Cucamonga, California, where I re-started my interior design business in my garage, attended Chaffey College, and eventually California State University, Fullerton to pursue a fine art degree. As I learned more about my adopted country, my idealized childhood perceptions began to change.

While at Cal State Fullerton I discovered printmaking and studied with Maurice Gray. From the moment I discovered the printing press, I knew I had found the medium for creating my flags. I worked on my first plate for nearly six months and would come to the studio to print my flags at night, creating what would become the first monoprint in the envisioned series titled New Shades of Old Glory™. At the year-end class critique, there was no response from the class about my flags. The flag monoprints went into a drawer, and after finishing my studies, I moved on to start a fine art gallery and custom framing shop in 1989 and focused on building my business.

In 1991, I decided to exhibit the flag monoprints at the Art Expo in New York City. At that event, seven of them were sold, and an additional six works were sold later that year at an exhibition in a Las Vegas gallery. In a press interview at the time, the reporter implied that through my flags, I was only wanting to profit from the Middle East conflicts, but that was not at all the case. I showed my American flag series one more time in March 1996 at the New York Expo. This series is very personal for me, and I then decided I did not want to continue selling the original monoprints. The flags went back into the drawer, where they remained until 2021.

Realizing that the new giclée printing process would allow me to retain the original monoprints and still be able to share my flags led me to bring the flags out from the drawer and begin again to work on the series. With hundreds of notes, sketches, and doodles accumulated to develop the remaining flags in the series, I have begun printing again.  The goal is to complete a series of 99 flags and offer each one as giclée prints.

As I get older, I want to finish projects I started, and this series is one of them. Each flag is a unique work of art, and the series has been influenced by my personal experiences – as a child in Iran, as an immigrant to the United States, and by the experiences and relationships, I have had over my lifetime. Visual art is how I best communicate, and it is time for these flags to come out of the drawer for good.

The American flag can have different meanings for each person. In it, we can see the best and worst of times and the best and worst in people. Through this series, I explore issues of environment, religion, crime and punishment, democracy, and the challenge of America’s future. The work is both timely and timeless. – M