How Marc Brickman Turned the Empire State Building Into Jasper Johns’ Three Flags

On May 1, 2015, the Empire State Building stopped acting like an office tower and started acting like a painting. Lighting designer Marc Brickman used the building’s LED crown to interpret twelve works from the Whitney Museum’s collection. Jasper Johns’ Three Flags took the 8:30 p.m. slot.

The Whitney was opening its new downtown home that day, and the tower was celebrating its 84th birthday. Turning paintings into skyline light was a first for the building.

Here’s how Brickman pulled it off, why Three Flags fit the night so well, and how to bring a piece of it home.

The Empire State Building Light Show at a Glance

Sources: the Whitney’s event page and New York Times coverage reproduced by the National Arts Program Foundation.

Who Is Marc Brickman, and Why Did the Whitney Pick a Lighting Designer?

Brickman has spent roughly five decades behind some of the biggest stages in music. His credits include Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen, and the Barcelona and Nagano Olympics ceremonies. You can read more in our look at the Pink Floyd lighting designer’s art and on his About page.

He also had history with the building. In 2012, Empire State Realty Trust asked him to rethink its lighting, and he tested the new LEDs that year with a show synced to an Alicia Keys radio broadcast.

The Whitney’s side of the story is more surprising. Chief curator Donna De Salvo said the easy option would have been red, white and blue lights. The building’s planners wanted more. They started asking what the collection itself could look like in light.

How Do You Turn a Painting Into Light on a Skyscraper?

Carefully. A painting is pigment on canvas. This was light on limestone.

The scale gap alone was strange. Warhol’s Flowers measures 36 by 36 inches. Three Flags is about 31 by 46 inches. The building stands 1,454 feet tall.

Brickman didn’t try to copy the works. He worked from “their color palettes and the way they painted,” and the press called the result an uplit abstraction, not a pixel-perfect projection. Anthony Malkin, who runs Empire State Realty Trust, put it plainly: the show was meant to be representational, not a reproduction.

The prep was serious:

1. The Whitney sent Brickman high-resolution images of the paintings.
2. The team ran a virtual test on screens first.
3. A full run-through happened on the building itself in the middle of the night the Friday before.

The hardware helped. Before 2012, crews changed the building’s colors by hand, fitting plastic lenses over 200-plus bulbs. The LED system now changes color on its own, and Brickman said the backup systems kept the lights on through Hurricane Sandy. Before the show, he also said he planned to watch from a hotel while special effects artist Dietrich Juengling ran the computers.

The Full Lineup, Hour by Hour

The Whitney published this schedule for the night:

Why Did Jasper Johns’ Three Flags Fit a Light Show?

Three Flags is a 1958 painting of three American flags stacked on three canvases. Each is about 25% smaller than the one beneath it, so the smallest flag sits closest to you. Johns made it in encaustic, which is pigment in hot wax, and it projects almost five inches off the wall.

Johns got the idea for flag paintings from a dream in 1954. He said his subjects were “things the mind already knows”. He also argued that a flag painting is no more about a flag than about a brushstroke.

The painting has its own Whitney story too. The museum bought it in 1980 for $1 million, a record price then, to mark its 50th anniversary. The Whitney bought it from collectors Burton and Emily Hall Tremaine. Thirty-five years later, it lit up the Empire State Building for the museum’s biggest move.

The painting also suits light. It’s instantly familiar, it’s built on repetition, and its layers create depth. Press coverage describes the show as palette-driven, so think of Brickman’s version as Three Flags translated into color and light, not copied onto stone.

Can You Own a Piece of That Night?

The light show lasted six hours. The ESB x Whitney Collaboration is how Brickman’s interpretations live on as prints, and the Marc Brickman Jasper Johns Inspired Three Flags Canvas Art Print – American Flag Contemporary Wall Art is the one that starts from Johns.

What you get:

• Size: 19" × 28"
• Print: full color on 100# Dull Cover stock
• Finish: matte, designed to cut glare
• Subject: abstract American flag art inspired by Three Flags

It suits collectors of American art, fans of contemporary design, and anyone who likes a piece with a New York story behind it. Because it’s a single bold image, it works as a statement piece in a living room, studio or office.

All eight prints in the collection share the same 19" × 28" size, so they hang well as a set. The lineup includes Warhol’s Flowers, Rothko, Elizabeth Murray, Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds and Mary Ellen Bute’s Synchromy No. 4: Escape. A second Three Flags print is in there too if you want to compare.