|
|
The last 3 paintings of this series were completed just before her first one-woman show at Spectrum in December of 1967. During this time the Civil Rights Movement was evolving into the Black Revolution. "Black Power" had just been cried out in 1966 by Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Stokely Carmichael (Ringgold 156).
The use of the American Flag, in the American People Series puts Ringgold into a canon of artists using this icon as a tool of protest of repression in the 1950's and 60's, such as Jasper Johns and Claes Oldenburg. But Ringgold expressed that John's Flag painting was incomplete. To complete the picture Ringgold would have to show "some of the hell that had broken out in the States, and what better place to do that than in the stars and stripes" (Ringgold 158).
In The Flag is Bleeding the three figures--Black man, White man and mediator White woman stand arm in arm. First glance might be a plea for racial harmony, but this reading is upset by the fact that the flag is dripping with blood and the Black man holds his hand over his heart to stop the flow of blood from his wound. The White man stands with his hands on his hips in a confident and prominent position. The Black man's face is obscured by the superimposed 48 stars, while neither the white man or white girl are as heavily cloaked. The black man is the only one wounded, but he is also the only one with a weapon.
Patrick Hill astutely identifies the figures: "the white male's business suit, the trendy chemise of the young white woman, and the bloody black turtleneck of the black male represent carefully considered signifiers that situate the three characters respectively as an agent of white male hegemonic power, a bourgeois female interloper/pacifist and a black nationalist revolutionary" (Cameron 27).
Ringgold offers some answers to this enigmatic piece but leaves others unanswered .In her autobiography in 1995, she writes, " the fragile white woman standing in the stripes is the peace-maker. The black man carries a knife while the white man packs a gun on each hip, ready to draw, western style. In 1967 not many black men had access to guns. And why is there no black woman in this picture? Let us just say that in 1967 she was reluctantly standing behind her man. The white woman too, but somebody had to get between these two men and since she was the daughter of the white power structure, she had inherited the role of peacemaker" (Ringgold 158).
The insistence that the white male is gun-toting in her verbal description is suspect since there is not evidence of it in the visual. It is just as powerful a statement about the state of race relations of 1967 if he is just wielding an overconfidence about his power position. But if the white man does not have guns as Ringgold describes then is the black man's wound self-inflicted by the only weapon present?
