Faith Ringgold, What Is The Proper Way To Display The American Flag?

Flags and Their Many Meanings
Art Appreciation
Final Critical Essay
By: Rachelle Goude
April 23, 2005

Critical Essay on God Bless America, Faith Ringgold, What is the Proper Way to Display the American Flag?, Dread Scott Tyler and The World Flag Ant Farm, Yukinori Yanagi.

Flags and their Many Meanings

I will be describing and evaluating the works and artists described above. To begin I will describe each work and its symbolism. I will then summarize the artists and the times of their artworks. Afterwards, I will explain how the works fit into the time period and then compare and contrast all three artworks.
To begin, I chose the above artworks because of their symbols, the flag. Each artwork depicts a flag in different forms
(Sayre, p.20) The white woman in the painting is pledging her allegiance to the flag but in the same breath she is being depicted as a racist denying blacks their civil rights. It is also depicting the struggles that her community and she were facing while trying to gain equal rights from the majority of white Americans. In this oil painting she uses only three colors, black, white and red which are indicative to her other paintings in the series. She uses rectangles and squares to depict the flag, even the woman in the painting has an elongated rectangular appearance to her. The second, What is the Proper Way to Display the American Flag? is an exhibit by Dread Scott Tyler, a minority student at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibit is a 34 by 57 inch American flag on the floor underneath pictures of flag-draped coffins and South Koreans burning flags and holding signs that said "Yankee, go home son of a bitch". There is also a ledger where viewers can write their answers to the question "What is the proper way to display a U.S. flag?" Two problems with the setup of this exhibit where the flag draped on the floor and the placement of the ledger book.
God Bless America and Ant Farm are similar for an obvious reason…they both are about flags. However, they both have totally different meanings. Ringgold's work is about civil rights and racism while Yanagi's work is about cultural globalization and nationalism. (Sayre, p.21) In a way, they are similar in that they both deal with political and social issues that African Americans and Japanese citizens face everyday. Racism is not only a black/white problem it includes people of ALL races whether it be black, white, Hispanic, Japanese, Chinese, Korean or even Jewish. Racism doesn't just cover the color of your skin, it covers everything about an individual's way of life including their religion and the style of clothes he or she may wear. Ringgold's God Bless America is an expression of the emotional and physical torment of black Americans prior to and during the Civil Rights Movement. This piece of art movement had a lot of cultural ties to the population during the 1960's that also can be applied today. Yanagi is trying to show how cultural influences are changing his country's way of living which is also an issue in today's world. The cultural diversity throughout the world is changing the way everyone lives. In What is the Proper Way to Display the American Flag?, Tyler is expressing to the viewers that they have rights given to them by the United States constitution. Tyler's work and