She was punished for this: along with the two other members of the “Judson 3,” the co-organizers of “The People’s Flag Show” at the Judson Church in 1970, she was accused of flag desecration, and arrested.
Ringgold works the imagery and formal elements of the flag into stretched canvases, hanging textiles, and quilts, compositionally loosening its bounded stripes into pieced squares and linear borders-transfigurations that suggest Old Glory can withstand critique while retaining its symbolic potency. © 2021 Faith Ringgold / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Red stripes enclose a white woman and the two men, one white and one Black, with whom she links arms white stars obscure the face of the Black man, who holds a knife in one hand and covers a seemingly self-inflicted wound with the other, his blood the same vermilion as the flag’s.įaith Ringgold, American People #4: The Civil Rights Triangle, 1963, oil on canvas, 36 1/8 by 42 1/8 inches. Ringgold famously contorted the American flag into a structure of confinement in American People #18: The Flag Is Bleeding (1967).
The ideals represented by “America”-equality, liberty, and justice-are more literally overwritten (by images of bloodshed and the phrase “white power”) in later works reflecting the violence following Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965. In American People #4: The Civil Rights Triangle (1963), a white man stands above, yet behind, a phalanx of four darker-skinned men his symbolic participation is removed from the corporeal vulnerability so central to the social justice movement. Flat planes of color edged in black delineate the figures of her early work from the 1960s, where compositions often illustrate tense interracial relations-people torn between peace and violence, ambivalence and anger. The first galleries introduce “Super Realism,” Ringgold’s signature style of abstracted figuration and sharp graphic and conceptual contrasts, which she developed to address the halting progress of the pursuit of social and political equality in the United States.
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