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][4]

Utopian Pride Flag #6 is one of the earliest works in the Flags for Utopia series, which spans 2022 to 2025 and is numbered as high as #36. The series is mixed in method: most of the works are cut, recombined and resewn from commercially manufactured pride flags and deadstock flag nylon, while this one is machine-printed, and one, Flag #3, is a recto-verso handheld acrylic flag. The subtitle "2040 Progress Flag" positions the work as a speculative projection, imagining the Progress Pride Flag eighteen years after the work was made. The blur treats 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 an artist, futurist and Queer archivist based in Chicago. He holds a BFA in fine art from New York University and is pursuing an MA in art education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; he sings baritone in the Chicago Gay Men's Chorus and co-chairs the Wethersfield LGBTQ+ Pride Committee in Connecticut, the town where works from this series have been installed and collected. He is also the host and editor of this database. ^[4]

"the Progress flag is blurred to the degree of 20/40 vision", Will Montgomery, original work description and artist talks ^[5][2]

"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 the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Spring 2026 ^[5]

Stated inspirations

• Queer futurist embodiment as an artistic practice^[4]
• Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell^[5]
• African-American Flag by David Hammons^[5]
• Silence = Death^[5]
• Cruising Utopia by José Esteban Muñoz^[5]

Attribution notes

Will Montgomery designed and printed the work. No collaborator, fabricator or commissioner is named for it. He is also the host and editor of this database. ^[1][4]

Origin

Country

United States

Region / state

New York

City

New York City

Place Type

city

Physical Origin Status

Made in New York City per the artist. ^[3] Recorded at city level; no studio or address is documented or published.

Created in New York City, on the ancestral homeland of the Lenape people, known as Lenapehoking. ^[6][7]

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. 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. ^[6][7]

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. ^[6]

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

Made in New York City in 2022, during the artist's years at New York University, as part of the Flags for Utopia project. ^[3]

Dates & Chronology

Year Created

2022

Year Designed For

2040

Earliest dated documentation

2022

Period in Use

2022–2023

The work exists within a fine-art practice and has not been adopted as a community pride flag. It has flown: Montgomery kept it on his rooftop flagpole in Brooklyn for months across 2022 and 2023. ^[3]

The works from the series flown at Riis Beach in Brooklyn on 28 June 2024, at the Hartford Capitol Building on 11 December 2024 and over the Old Wethersfield Cove Warehouse on 3 January 2025, and the works collected by the Town of Wethersfield Historical Society, The Earl of Bushwick and Directangle Press, are other numbered pieces. ^{[1][8][9][10]}

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. ^[4][11][8]

Lineage

Direct predecessors

Progress Pride Flag

Sibling flags

Indigiqueer / Two-Spirit Flag (cedar-maw), Intersex-Inclusive Pride Flag, Jewish Progress Pride Flag (Keshet), Sego Belonging Flag, Two-Spirit Progress Pride Flag, Inclusive Diversity Pride Flag (TransIphis, 2022)

The "2040 Progress Flag" subtitle names the work's source: Daniel Quasar's Progress Pride Flag of 2018, projected eighteen years forward and blurred. This is an artwork engaging with the lineage rather than a functional redesign within it.

Its descendant is the 5790/2029 Pride Flag of 2026, which applies the same method to the Intersex-Inclusive Progress Pride Flag at a different stated degree of vision. ^[1]

Lineage tree

Every record reachable from this one through documented parent and child relationships: 7 records across 6 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)

Colors & Symbolism

The flag inherits its colour vocabulary from the Progress Pride Flag but blurs every boundary between its elements, so that no colour begins or ends cleanly. The blurring enacts the 20/40 vision of the flag's name: the categories pride flags conventionally separate, life, healing, sunlight, nature, harmony, spirit, trans identity and racial justice, are presented as continuous and overlapping rather than discrete. The deliberate loss of sharp boundaries is the work's central statement. ^[1]

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

The stripe meanings are inherited from the Progress Pride Flag and are intentionally blurred. Montgomery has stated that the blurring signals "uncertainty and blurred arbitrary boundaries and categorizations". Individual meanings should be read as tendencies within a gradient rather than as discrete symbolic assignments. Unlike the later 5790/2029 Pride Flag, this work predates and does not carry the intersex emblem: its source is the Progress flag as Quasar published it. ^[1]

The values listed are the archive's reference palette for the source design, Daniel Quasar's 2018 Progress Pride Flag. They are read from this archive's own redrawn SVG of that flag rather than from an official Quasar specification, and the Progress Pride Flag entry records them as provisional. Neither this artwork nor its source has a separately published flat-colour palette. ^[12]

They describe the design being blurred, not this work's pixels. The blur generates intermediate colours continuously and dissolves the source design's discrete boundaries, so no value survives as a flat field. An exact-RGB comparison performed by this archive against the artwork's own web file, utopian-pride-flag-6-2040-progress.png, 1014 by 672 pixels, on 12 August 2026, found no pixel equal to any of the eleven triplets; the nearest colour present lay between 29 and 138 in three-channel Euclidean RGB distance. The method is to enumerate the file's distinct RGB triplets and take, for each listed value, the minimum Euclidean distance to any of them. Zero exact matches does not mean the colours are absent from view: it means no pixel equals those exact triplets. The image held of the printed nylon is a photograph, so its pixel values describe lighting as much as ink and were not sampled. ^[1]

Design

Aspect Ratio

3:5 · documented

Ratio Notes

From the artist's own project page, which gives the work as "Machine printed nylon, 36" x 60"", 36 high by 60 wide, exactly 3:5. The image held here is a photograph of the physical work, 1014 by 672 pixels, whose framing does not reproduce the print's proportion. ^[1]

Orientation

horizontal

Layout

other

The Progress Pride Flag's composition with every edge dissolved: the rainbow field runs red at the top to violet at the bottom, and the chevron survives as a pale region at the hoist. No element has a boundary. Described from the photograph of the work; the print file has not been examined. ^[1]

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]

A figure such as 20/40 is a visual-acuity fraction: it describes what a viewer sees at twenty feet against what normal vision resolves at forty. ^[13] It measures sharpness at distance and is not itself a measurement of astigmatism, which is a refractive error caused by an irregularly shaped cornea or lens. ^[14] The blur is an artistic treatment described by that figure, not a clinical simulation or a calibrated filter.

A continuous colour gradient with no hard edges, carrying the rainbow field and chevron of the Progress Pride Flag as soft overlapping regions. Machine-printed nylon, 36 by 60 inches. ^[1]

Usage & Adoption

First Users

Will Montgomery (artist)

Geographic Usage

Brooklyn, New York (the artist's rooftop flagpole, 2022–2023)

Online Usage

willmontgomery.art

Current Status

active

The work exists within a fine-art practice and has not been adopted as a community pride flag. It has flown: Montgomery kept it on his rooftop flagpole in Brooklyn for months across 2022 and 2023. ^[3]

The works from the series flown at Riis Beach in Brooklyn on 28 June 2024, at the Hartford Capitol Building on 11 December 2024 and over the Old Wethersfield Cove Warehouse on 3 January 2025, and the works collected by the Town of Wethersfield Historical Society, The Earl of Bushwick and Directangle Press, are other numbered pieces. ^{[1][8][9][10]}

Image Archive

The flag it blurs

The work

Flying

The work it leads to

Discourse & Debates

Common misidentifications

• Not to be confused with the 5790/2029 Pride Flag, the later work that extends this one's method. That flag blurs the Intersex-Inclusive Progress Pride Flag to a 20/30 astigmatism; this one blurs the Progress Pride Flag, without the intersex emblem, to 20/40 vision. ^[1]

This record documents an artwork that takes the form of a flag rather than a community-adopted identity flag. Its creator, Will Montgomery, is also the host and editor of this database. The entry is written under that relationship and discloses it so readers can evaluate the entry accordingly.

Footnotes & Citations

Image Sources

Rendering

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

• Credit: Will MontgomeryRights Copyright Will Montgomery. Reproduced by the artist, who is also the editor of this database. Credit required; not available for free reproduction.
• Credit: Daniel QuasarRights Reproduced from the archive's own record of the source flag.
• The Progress Pride Flag, designed by Daniel Quasar in 2018: the image this work blurs, and the source of all eleven of its listed colours. ^[1] · Credit: Daniel Quasar · Encycloflaggia
• Utopian Pride Flag #6 (2040 Progress Flag), 2022. Machine-printed nylon, 36 by 60 inches. ^[1] · Credit: Will Montgomery · Will Montgomery Studio
• The flag flying. The photograph is the one the artist's project page uses for the work; Montgomery identifies the pole as his Brooklyn rooftop flagpole, where the flag flew for months across 2022 and 2023. ^[1][3] · Credit: Will Montgomery · Will Montgomery Studio
• The 5790/2029 Pride Flag, 2026, the later work that carries this one's method to the Intersex-Inclusive Progress Pride Flag. ^[1] · Credit: Will Montgomery · Encycloflaggia