Here, three Black men laboriously pull a seemingly endless caravan of representations of societal ills to a dumping ground. Comprised of twelve canvasses, Trash reveals Benny Andrews’s frustration with the state of the nation, with references to the Ku Klux Klan, patriotism, incarceration, and labor, among other themes. The painting is part of "The Bicentennial Series", a six-year series begun in 1970 as a preemptive response to what Andrews accurately predicted would be the exclusion of African-American history and culture from the 1976 U.S. bicentennial celebrations.