Alfonse Pagano is a New York–based multidisciplinary artist and photographer whose practice spans more than five decades. Emerging from the experimental climate of the late 1960s, his work has continually fused photography, painting, sculpture, and text in a circular process of layering, erasure, and reinvention. Pagano is widely known for Dreads(Artisan/Workman Press), a seminal photographic book that brought international recognition, and for his ongoing mixed-media flag series Rush to Relics, which confronts national identity and democratic fracture through distressed, reimagined American flags. His work has been exhibited in galleries and institutions across the United States, including the Carnegie Museum of Art’s “Ten Americans,” and is informed by decades of studio practice in New York, Los Angeles, and beyond, as well as formative seafaring voyages in the Caribbean. Pagano’s art persistently explores time, memory, symbolism, and the physical act of making as a form of reckoning and renewal.