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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: Gouache, 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: © 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
  • Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art

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