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Freedom of Speech

1990
Not on view
Since the 1960s Ringgold used her art to address gender and racial issues in America and Europe. In Freedom of Speech—commissioned by the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia as a poster design for a 1991 exhibition commemorating the two-hundredth anniversary of the Bill of Rights—Ringgold painted the words of the First Amendment, which protects the freedoms of speech, religious practice, peaceful assembly, and lawful redress of grievances, on the red stripes of the American flag. Over the stars and white stripes, she names individuals and groups who were perpetrators or victims of serious breaches of these freedoms, laying bare that across U.S. history, the country’s ideals put forth in the Bill of Rights and symbolized by the flag have not always been upheld by its government or its people.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Freedom of Speech
  • Artist: Faith Ringgold (American, New York, 1930–2024 Englewood, New Jersey)
  • Date: 1990
  • Medium: Opaque watercolor, acrylic paint, metallic paint and porous-point pen with graphite on paper
  • Dimensions: 24 × 36 in. (61 × 91.4 cm)
  • Classification: Drawings
  • Credit Line: Purchase, Gift of Hyman N. Glickstein, by exchange, 2001
  • Object Number: 2001.288
  • Rights and Reproduction: © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
  • Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art

More Artwork

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Coming to Jones Road, Drawing #7, Under a Blood Red Sky
Faith Ringgold
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Coming to Jones Road under a Blood Red Sky #8, from "Femfolio", Faith Ringgold American, Digital print with hand lithography
Coming to Jones Road under a Blood Red Sky #8, from "Femfolio"
Multiple artists/makers
2007
Under a Blood Red Sky, Faith Ringgold American, Color soft ground etching and lift ground aquatint
Under a Blood Red Sky
Faith Ringgold
2001
Street Story Quilt, Faith Ringgold American, Cotton canvas, acrylic paint, ink marker, dyed and printed cotton, and sequins, sewn to a cotton flannel backing
Street Story Quilt
Faith Ringgold
1985
Under a Blood Red Sky
Faith Ringgold
2000

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