Kent Bicentennial Portfolio: The Spirit of Independence

The Kent Bicentennial Portfolio, titled “Spirit of Independence,” includes 12 prints made by 12 American artists.

The portfolio was commissioned by the Lorillard Tobacco Company in celebration of the United States’ Bicentennial in 1976.

The twelve artists represent some of the leading contemporary artists at that time: Will Barnet, Colleen Browning, Audrey Flack, Red Grooms, Joseph Hirsch, Robert Indiana, Alex Katz, Jacob Lawrence, Marisol, Larry Rivers, Edward Ruscha, and Fritz Scholder.

Each of the 12 artists included in the commission was free to choose their subject and depict it however they wanted. Their only prompt was, “What does independence mean to you?”, and their only requirement was that the work needed to be either a lithograph or serigraph. The artists were free to choose print size and the printers who produced the editions.

The Taubman Museum of Art (then the Roanoke Fine Arts Center) was one of two recipients of the portfolio in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts was the other recipient.

The 12 prints in the portfolio were the first 12 works to be accessioned into the Museum’s Permanent Collection in 1976.

The portfolio offers a window onto how these contemporary artists thought about the United States and the idea of independence in the 1970s.

Exhibiting them in 2026, the Semiquicentennial of the United States, allows for visitors to consider what has changed or stayed the over the past half century.