Utopian Pride Flag #6 (2040 Progress Flag)

Overview

Part of a sustained artistic investigation into the pride flag as a cultural, political, and aesthetic object. Montgomery's practice reimagines the pride flag from a Utopian perspective, treating the form as a site for critical engagement rather than settled symbolism. ^[1][2]

Utopian Pride Flag #6 is one of the earliest works in the Flags for Utopia series, which spans 2022 to 2025 and includes at least 36 numbered pieces. The series uses re-ordered nylon pride flags as raw material, physically cutting, recombining, and reassembling commercially manufactured pride flags into new compositions. The subtitle '2040 Progress Flag' positions the work as a speculative projection, imagining what a Progress Pride Flag might look like eighteen years in the future. The design deliberately blurs the source flag's geometry, treating visual clarity as a metaphor for the blurring of arbitrary boundaries and categorizations. ^[1]

Identity & Context

Represented Identity

2SLGBTQIAP+ community (speculative / Utopian framing)

Movement

Queer futurism, Queer art practice

National Context

United States

The work represents the 2SLGBTQIAP+ community through a speculative, Utopian lens. It exists within the context of Will Montgomery's broader artistic practice rather than as a symbol produced for or adopted by a specific subcommunity.

Creators

The Creator

Will Montgomery

Artist & Writer

Will Montgomery (he/any) is a Chicago-based artist and writer who works through the pride flag to imagine Queer futures. ^[2]

"the Progress flag is blurred to the degree of 20/40 vision", Will Montgomery

"by keeping the pride flag a living symbol, constantly experimenting and changing it, we are pushing the culture forward, remembering not to stay stagnant.", Will Montgomery, artist talk at SAIC, Spring 2026

Stated inspirations

• Queer futurist embodiment as an artistic practice^[2]
• Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell
• African-American Flag by David Hammons
• Silence = Death
• Cruising Utopia by José Esteban Muñoz

Origin

Country

United States

Region / state

Illinois

City

Chicago

Place Type

artist studio

Digital Origin

false

Created in New York City, on the ancestral homeland of the Lenape people, known as Lenapehoking. ^[3][4]

Indigenous land context

Lenape (Munsee-speaking) — ancestral homeland (Lenapehoking) (Indigenous name: Lenapehoking). The land now designated as New York City is the homeland of the Lenape people, known as Lenapehoking. Indigenous people have lived in this region for at least 11,500 years. The word "Manhattan" derives from the Munsee Lenape language. The Lenape were violently displaced over 400 years of European settler colonialism. Today the Lenape are a diasporic people with descendants in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Ontario, and New Jersey, among other places. New York City has one of the largest urban Native American and Indigenous populations in the United States. ^[3][4]

Colonial / settler context

This flag was created and exhibited on Lenapehoking, the stolen homeland of the Lenape people, without Indigenous co-authorship or engagement with Lenape sovereignty. No recognized treaty of cession exists for Manhattan. ^[3]

Land status

Colonized (contested 1626 transaction, no recognized treaty of cession)

Indigenous engagement

None documented

Continuing presence

Lenape diaspora communities in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Ontario, and New Jersey; NYC has one of the largest urban Indigenous populations in the United States

Created as part of the Flags for Utopia project. Other works in the series have been flown at Riis Beach (Brooklyn), the Hartford Capitol Building (Connecticut), and the Old Wethersfield Cove Warehouse (Connecticut). In 2025, the installation Utopian Pride Flags on Main was presented in collaboration with the Old Wethersfield Shopkeepers Association, and an edition of 100 hand-held flags was produced for the Town of Wethersfield Pride Festival. ^[1][5]

Dates & Chronology

Year Created

2022

Year Designed For

2040

Period in Use

2022–present

The work exists within the context of a fine art practice and has not been adopted as a community pride flag. Other works in the Flags for Utopia series have been installed publicly, flown at Riis Beach in Brooklyn (June 28, 2024), at the Hartford Capitol Building (December 11, 2024), and over the Old Wethersfield Cove Warehouse in Connecticut (January 3, 2025). Works from the series have entered permanent collections at the Town of Wethersfield Historical Society (2025), The Earl of Bushwick (2025), and Directangle Press (2024). ^[1][5][6][7]

Montgomery has also published 'A Pre-Utopian Pride Flag Code,' described as an 'essay/flag code hybrid' that 'queers the form of dense bureaucratic documents to establish real standards of care for Queer pride flags.' The publication was printed at Directangle Press and distributed through Printed Matter in New York, where it was featured at the 2024 Frieze Art Fair.

In 2024, Montgomery performed In Defense of Black Leisure with Noel W Anderson Studios at the 15th Gwangju Biennale. ^[2][8][5]

Lineage

Direct predecessors

Progress Pride Flag

Direct children

5790/2029 Pride Flag

Related flags

Intersex-Inclusive Progress Pride Flag

Sibling flags

Indigiqueer Pride Flag (cedar-maw), Intersex-Inclusive Progress Pride Flag

The '2040 Progress Flag' subtitle explicitly references the Progress Pride Flag tradition, positioning the work as a speculative future iteration. However, this is an artwork engaging with the lineage rather than a functional redesign within it. The flag is materially constructed from commercially manufactured pride flags, giving it a literal physical lineage from existing pride flag production.

Lineage tree

Every record reachable from this one through documented parent and child relationships: 8 records across 7 generations.

Ancestors -5

Original Rainbow Flag (1978)

Ancestors -4

Seven-Stripe Rainbow Flag (1978)

Ancestors -3

Rainbow Pride Flag

Ancestors -2

Transgender Pride Flag, Philadelphia Pride Flag

Ancestor

Progress Pride Flag

This record

Utopian Pride Flag #6 (2040 Progress Flag)

Children

5790/2029 Pride Flag

Colors & Symbolism

The flag inherits its color vocabulary from Valentino Vecchietti's Intersex-Inclusive Progress Pride Flag of 2021 but blurs all boundaries between stripes, so that no color begins or ends cleanly. This blurring represents the 20/40 vision referenced in the flag's name: the categories and meanings that pride flags conventionally separate (life, healing, nature, harmony, trans identity, racial justice, intersex inclusion) are presented as continuous and overlapping rather than discrete. The deliberate loss of sharp boundaries is the flag's central design statement.

This flag has no official digital palette. Color values shown are approximate.

The stripe meanings are inherited from the Progress Pride Flag family but are intentionally blurred. Will Montgomery has stated that the blurring signals 'uncertainty and blurred arbitrary boundaries and categorizations.' Individual stripe meanings should be understood as tendencies within a gradient, not as discrete symbolic assignments.

The color palette is inherited from the Progress Pride Flag and rendered as a continuous gradient through the blur treatment. No independent palette has been published for this work. Colors visible in photographic documentation include white, light blue, pink, brown, black, red, orange, yellow, green, blue-indigo, and violet, all sourced from the Progress flag's established palette.

Design

Aspect Ratio

3:5

Orientation

horizontal

Layout

other

A 36" x 60" machine-printed nylon flag that takes the Progress Pride Flag's composition as its source and applies a uniform blur, calibrated, per the artist, to the degree of 20/40 vision. The chevron geometry, rainbow stripes, and identity-specific elements of the Progress flag remain legible as shapes and color fields but lose their hard boundaries, merging into a continuous gradient. The effect treats the flag not as a fixed design but as a form in motion. The gradient treatment and soft color transitions distinguish it from standard striped flag designs. ^[1]

Usage & Adoption

First Users

Will Montgomery (artist)

Geographic Usage

New York City (artist installations), Old Wethersfield, CT (public installation with Shopkeepers Association, 2025), Wethersfield, CT (Pride Festival edition, 2025)

Online Usage

willmontgomery.art

Current Status

active

This is an artwork, not a community-adopted flag. Usage is limited to the artist's own exhibitions and installations.

Image Archive

Reference rendering

Discourse & Debates

• The flag's deliberate blurring of stripe boundaries raises a question that the project itself is interested in: whether pride flag categories help or hinder. The 2040 Progress Flag positions itself as a critical intervention, an artwork that uses the conventions of pride flag design to question the assumption that identities can or should be cleanly separated. This places the flag in conversation with the broader project's documentary stance toward flag genealogy.
• Whether an artist-authored experimental pride flag belongs in the same archive as community-created identity flags. The Utopian Pride Flag #6 is unambiguously authored as an artwork (Will Montgomery, 2022), in contrast to most pride flags in the database which emerged from community use. The entry is included partly because the project's editor created it, a transparency choice rather than a claim about adoption.

This record documents an artwork that takes the form of a flag, not a modern community identity flag. Transparency note: this flag's creator, Will Montgomery, is also the host and editor of this database. I have skin in the game! This disclosure is provided so that readers can weigh the entry's framing accordingly.

Footnotes & Citations

Image Sources

Rendering

Utopian Pride Flag #6 (2040 Progress Flag), 2022

• Utopian Pride Flag #6 (2040 Progress Flag), 2022. A 36" x 60" machine-printed nylon flag by Will Montgomery, part of the Flags for Utopia series. The Progress Pride Flag's geometry is blurred to the degree of 20/40 vision, signaling uncertainty and the softening of arbitrary boundaries within the 2SLGBTQIAP+ community. · Credit: Will Montgomery · Will Montgomery Studio
• Studio reference image of the Utopian Pride Flag #6 / 2040 Progress by Will Montgomery. See the entry's transparency note: this is the artist's own work, included in the database with disclosed conflict of interest. · Credit: Will Montgomery · Artist's own studio image