Minnesota's flag is one of the newest in the country and one of the simplest: a dark blue shape at the hoist, cut to an abstraction of the state's outline, holding a single white eight-pointed star, with the rest of the field a pale sky blue. It replaced a 131-year-old seal flag on May 11, 2024, after a redesign process that drew over two thousand public submissions, a good deal of national attention, and some pointed arguments about what had been on the old flag in the first place.
The old flag and its problem
From 1893 to 2024, Minnesota's flag was the state seal on a blue field. The original version, made for the state's pavilion at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, was two-sided, white on the front and blue on the reverse, with the seal wreathed in lady's slippers and nineteen gold stars. A 1957 revision made the flag royal blue on both sides to cut manufacturing costs, and the seal was adjusted again in 1983.
The seal was the problem. It showed a farmer plowing a field in the foreground while a Native American man on horseback rode past, and for generations Dakota and Ojibwe people read the scene as exactly what it looked like: settlement in front, displacement riding away behind it. The image dated to the 1850s, when Minnesota Territory was being opened to settlers through treaties that were quickly broken. Critics called the seal a portrait of Manifest Destiny. Defenders read the two figures more benignly, but the state's own history, including the mass execution of 38 Dakota men at Mankato in 1862, made the benign reading hard to sustain.
There was also the ordinary design complaint: a seal with tiny figures, text, and dates on a blue field is unreadable on a pole and interchangeable with the flags of twenty-plus other states.
The commission and the contest
In May 2023, the DFL-controlled legislature created the State Emblems Redesign Commission and gave it a deadline: produce a new flag and seal by January 1, 2024, with the designs becoming official on May 11, 2024, Statehood Day, unless lawmakers intervened. The 13-member commission included appointees representing the Dakota and Ojibwe communities and other cultural councils. The enabling law barred the new designs from representing any single community or person.
The public sent in 2,123 flag proposals and 398 seal designs. The submissions became a minor internet event; entries ranged from serious vexillography to a loon with laser eyes. The commission narrowed the field to six finalists in November 2023, and on December 19, 2023 it selected entry F1953, by Andrew Prekker, a 24-year-old from Luverne in the state's southwest corner with no formal design training.
Prekker's original submission had a dark blue Minnesota-shaped panel and North Star at the hoist, with horizontal stripes of white, green, and light blue on the fly for snow, farmland, and water. The commission simplified, replacing the stripes with a single field of light blue. Prekker publicly supported the change.
What the design means
The dark blue panel is a stylized Minnesota, its angled edge tracing the state's familiar profile, and it doubles as the night sky. The white star is the North Star: Minnesota's motto is "L'Etoile du Nord," the Star of the North, adopted when the state was the northernmost point of the Union. The star has eight points, matching the star inlaid in the floor of the Capitol rotunda in St. Paul. The light blue field is water. The state's name comes from the Dakota "Mni Sota Makoce," often rendered as the land where the water reflects the sky, which makes a pale blue field carrying a dark blue sky a quiet bilingual pun.
The official colors are specific: the dark blue is Pantone 648 (hex #002D5D), the light blue Pantone 305 (#52C9E8). Proportions are 3:5.
Reception
The rollout was contentious in the way American flag changes now reliably are. Some legislators objected that the public never voted on the design; a number of rural counties passed symbolic resolutions declining to fly it. Others mourned the seal flag on heritage grounds. Design critics were mostly pleased, with some quibbles about the exact geometry of the hoist panel, and vexillologists rated the new flag far above the old one. Republican attempts to reverse the change or put it to a referendum failed, and the flag went up over the Capitol on schedule on May 11, 2024.
A year on, the arguments have mostly settled into the ordinary life of a state symbol. The design shows up on merchandise, murals, and license-plate proposals, and Minnesota now belongs to the small group of states, with Utah and Mississippi, that replaced a legacy flag in the 2020s and got something readable at a distance in the bargain.
References
[1] Wikipedia, "Flag of Minnesota." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Minnesota
[2] Smithsonian Magazine, "Minnesota Reveals New State Flag Design" (December 2023). https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/minnesota-reveals-new-state-flag-design-180983510/
[3] MPR News, "North Star motto inspired Luverne designer's Minnesota flag entry" (November 28, 2023). https://www.mprnews.org/story/2023/11/28/minnesota-state-flag-redesign-finalists-luverne-designer
[4] KARE 11, "New Minnesota flag designer reflects on change" (2024). https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/kare11-sunrise/a-banner-year-new-minnesota-flag-designer-reflects-on-change/89-8dee76b8-94d1-4f98-9b1c-0d754451be37
[5] Minnesota West Community and Technical College, "Andrew Prekker Emerges as Design Finalist for the Official Minnesota State Flag" (December 2023). https://www.mnwest.edu/about-us/news/2023-2024/2023-12-andrew-prekker-flag.php