The title of this exhibition takes its name from Pete Seeger’s 1955 song about the cyclicality and futility of war. Building upon Sister Mary Corita Kent’s 1969 serigraph Manflowers—where Seeger’s phrase appears along the bottom—this exhibition brings together works that return to that question anew. Publicly presented for the first time in over six years, The New School’s art collection is shown here in dialogue with contemporary artists who have served in the armed forces, a pairing that foregrounds perspectives rarely (if ever) granted visibility within contemporary art discourse.

The New School—a university shaped by a century of progressive thought and critical theory—provides an unexpected context for this convergence of voices. By placing the work of veterans of the armed forces in conversation with the artistic canon, Where Have All the Flowers Gone? offers a humanizing perspective on service that resists both heroic abstraction and easy condemnation. Instead, the exhibition reveals the grey areas where loyalty and doubt, service and conscience, coexist.

From post-war Europe to contemporary America, this selection of work unearths shared ground beneath those who have worn the uniform and those who have observed from without. In this collaboration, uncomplicated boundaries between consent and dissent are broken, making space for nuance and a shared need for purpose, belonging, protection and survival.