Alfredo Jaar’s “A Logo for America, 1987”

On January 3, 2026, the United States invaded Venezuela and kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro. This was, contrary to immediate appearances, a border defense. As Donald Trump’s amanuensis explains in a recent press release, “My Administration has made historic progress in protecting the American people from deadly drugs and vicious narcoterrorist organizations … our southern border is the most sealed and secure in American history.”1 The borders we are currently defending only date back to 1848, when the United States added more than half of Mexico to its own territory, but this matters little to most Americans’ definition of “America.” One of the cultural features of settler colonies is a sort of willful amnesia. And the United States’ borders, as well as its meaning, are less a matter of history than of literal definition—as in, a clearly visible line separating inside from outside. After “four years of open border chaos,” we know what America means because, so the logic goes, we know where its borders are. 

Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar’s A Logo for America was first displayed above a news ticker on Times Square in 1987, as a thirty-eight-second animation on a Spectacolor sign—which is basically a billboard covered in lights that can be programmed to blink in a certain order. The animation is simple, showing a map of the contiguous United States over which is superimposed the sentence “This is not America,” then an image of the US flag over which appears “This is Not America’s Flag,” followed by an image of the conjoined continents of North and South America erasing the word America, before spinning around as “America” repeatedly populates the screen in two vertical scrolls. The final image could be interpreted as a new and more accurate logo for America, with a full-screen America in which the two continents replace the “r.” 

The piece was reinstalled in 2014 in a very different, Disneyfied Times Square. Now, Galerie Lelong has restaged Jaar’s animation in its NYC space—an LED version hung at eye level behind a vitrine filled with concept notes—along with photographic documentation of several iterations of the artwork in situ. The show coincides, intentionally or not, with the United States’ 250th anniversary year. The celebration may only exist in the minds of campaign managers, but a congressional commission has been formed to celebrate the “semiquincentennial,” and along with some reality television–style competitions for young entrepreneurs, they have created—you guessed it—a new logo.2

The relationship between symbols and nationalism is both conceptually rich and very basic. The construction of a national identity may be a long, complicated process, but nationalism as an ideology is reductive and ahistorical. National definition, it turns out, hinges on simplification. Events unfolding over time are replaced by an imagined community that is static and spatially bounded. In other words, a map. Jaar’s outline of the contiguous United States is, in this sense, a perfect logo for America and representation of American-ness. This makes the statement “This is not America” far more interesting than it would be if the image were less symbolically efficient, but it might be rather far from what the artist intended. The meaning of the work, Jaar has admitted, has gotten away from him.

Jaar’s intention was to comment on the inaccurate use of the word “America” to refer only to the United States of America. America, the Chilean artist wanted people to understand, encompassed two continents; it was not simply synonymous with these continents’ most obnoxious imperial power. But is there something particularly valuable about a word derived from the name of a fifteenth-century Italian colonialist? Is the problem really the United States’ use of “America” to refer to itself alone, or the fact that the economic and military power of the United States does actually span two continents? This is a very different problem, and arguments that focus on linguistic determinism obscure the reality of US imperial power.

The tendency of the US to generalize itself at the level of culture is certainly a symptom of its ongoing imperialism, and the use of the word “America” to refer only to the United States may be a sign of the blinkered worldview of its privileged inhabitants. More accurately though, it is a symptom of the monolingualism that comes with such a privilege: almost no one knows that in Spanish they are a “United Statesian.” That white Americans don’t know that the Spanish word “Americanos” refers to anyone on the continent is a problem, but the fact that “United Statesian” is missing from American English doesn’t mean much in itself. This is the function that the terms “North America” and “South America” serve—as in North American Free Trade Agreement. Accurately denoting a region does not always have a politically desirable outcome.

A Logo for America is clearly citing Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (1929, ceci n’est pas une pipe), which undermines the artist’s claim to be concerned with accuracy. “This is not America” is simply pointing out that the map is not the territory. But unlike a pipe, a map has real imperial ambitions and political implications. Its borders determine fundamental aspects of social, economic, and political life. Jaar clearly knows this. The stakes of representation can be very high.

The United States has recently been a veritable echo chamber of A Logo for America’s opening salvo. In supremely ironic fashion, liberal pundits have condemned the worst features of US political culture by casting them as foreign.  The increase in visible state violence against immigrants and people of color “is not America.” A tyrannical Supreme Court is not “American.” Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s campaign slogan has grown into a fully-fledged political movement to “Make America Great Again,” by declaring all manner of activities and people “not American.” Which is to say that political discourse in the United States is often, sadly, reducible to deciding whether something is or is not “American.” 

A Logo for America has made appearances in other places over the years, and the rest of the show is mostly documentation of these iterations. Its display on a barge off the coast of Miami is notable. Here, the declaration seems less ambiguous. In this position, “This is not America” could easily mean Cuba—that most important Communist “other” and ally of Chile’s short-lived Allende Government before it was overthrown in a US-backed military coup that left Chile under the brutal but economically friendly Pinochet regime. Jaar is clearly also thinking about the historical role of the US in Chilean politics—as his ongoing “Kissinger project” demonstrates—which is why it is strange that A Logo for America is still largely discussed as a commentary on the failure of naming. Jaar’s body of work is vast, and while the simplicity of this particular gesture holds obvious appeal in a moment of shrill, racist nationalism—aimed primarily at our neighbors to the South—it falls flat. Rather than complicating conversations about nationalism, the popular discourse of nationalism seems to have simplified the piece. The portable nature of the logo makes it terribly context-dependent for meaning. I am afraid that A Logo for America has, by no fault of its own, been absorbed into this idiotic conversation about what is and is not American. One can only hope that the next time it is displayed, it finds itself in more interesting company.