Flagship

Adorned with legacy flags that community stakeholders created at dialogues, Oni’s Flagship turns a repurposed school bus into a mobile museum that will travel throughout South Jersey, sharing oral histories, images, and other archival materials from the community.

From the outset, Oni had a unique challenge when it came to tackling the question of what place-based commemoration might mean to South Jersey.  Oyster farming and processing in Port Norris, and the growing and freezing of vegetables at Seabrook Farms, took place in rural areas removed from large population centers with central public spaces. Atlantic City, a hub for New Jersey’s shore-based tourism and service economy, is isolated from other parts of South Jersey. Yet, through the complex, intertwining histories of South Jersey, the themes of travel and transportation surfaced time and again. Oni shares that he “started just thinking about the modes of transportation across South Jersey as both a challenge, and also a sort of a shared experience amongst all the residents, both presently and historically.”

With this in mind Oni acquired a bus that is being transformed into the mobile base for his traveling monument installation, and flag-bearing vessel. The Flagship will be outfitted with a retractable sail – becoming, in effect, a sailbus.

Oni with the acquired school bus.

Flagship references the experiences of maritime laborers that seeded and harvested oysters on the Delaware Bay, working on the iconic schooners used in the trade. The installation also invokes the buses and trucks that transported thousands of migrant farmworkers to the region every spring and summer, and, on a daily basis, to farflung fields where they would do that day’s picking. Flagship brings whimsy and play to South Jersey’s immigrant and migrant communities, a necessary reclaiming of joy in the midst of sometimes difficult regional histories and experiences.

Design rendering of Flagship on a boardwalk.

Flagship will display flags that Oni has created with community members at events throughout the region that express a deep sense of place. Titled “legacy flags,” these symbols capture the cultural traditions, lessons, and memories from the past that stakeholders want to pass on. Flagship will double as a mobile museum, to be stationed at different locations across South Jersey in the summer and fall of 2026. Oni and the NJMML team are curating oral histories, images, and archival materials and objects contributed by partners and community stakeholders, to allow visitors to the installation to engage with the diverse stories of labor and migration that are critical to the region’s history.

Oni notes that his installation, in addition to referencing the vessels and vehicles at the front of a migratory fleet, also evokes“a flagship of people themselves, meaning the first to come of future generations.”

Preliminary design rendering of Flagship from the side and the front, with depictions of legacy flags in the windows.

Exterior Design Elements:
1. Exterior hull to reflect like glass and water, the people and surroundings sites.
2. Legacy flags created by South Jersey stakeholders and descendent communities.
3. Motion sensor speakers, activated by visitors engaging with bus.
4. Sail deployed while the bus is stationary and raised at different events; rail rigging.
5. White roof to allow cool top for boarding deck. Hatch to board deck.
6. Retractable mast – extends when stationary, collapses while bus is in motion.

Preliminary design rendering of Flagship with details about the interior.

Interior Design Elements:
7. Headphone setup similar to airplane travel with regional audio stories.
8. Refurbished school bus interior.
9. 16-passenger school bus acquired from a New Jersey School district.

Preliminary design rendering of Flagship from the side and the front, with depictions of legacy flags in the windows.

From conversations about travel and vessels, Oni discovered that community stakeholders consider flags to be important symbols of cultural identity and preservation. For Flagship windows and audio storytelling emerged as meaningful ways to "look into" community histories. A key visual element, the mast mechanism is inflatable to simplify deployment of the sail and will be operated on the deck (roof) of the bus. In addition to being a vehicle for the stories to travel, the Flagship imagines stories and legacies travelling across the region.