Description:
Print and text from Portfolio consisting of title page, forward, introduction, six prints with accompanying sheet of text, leather portfolio envelope

Label Text:
Both activist and artist, Faith Ringgold has spent her distinguished career fighting for the rights of women and African Americans. In this print, one of six in the portfolio The Declaration of Freedom and Independence, Ringgold reveals inconsistencies in the phrase “All Men are Created Equal,” which is central to America’s most famous founding document, the Declaration of Independence.

On the left, King George III poses atop American colonists, physically and figuratively oppressing those helping his colonies prosper. On the right, a packed slave ship sails to America spilling African bodies into blood-stained waters. Ringgold juxtaposes a palette of red, white, and blue with the harsh realities of inequality and disenfranchisement of African Americans rooted in the founding of the United States.

-Katia Kiefaber '17, Art Museum Advisory Board Fellow, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum (Jan. 2018)

Tags:
civil rights; African American; enslaved persons

Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=MH+2016.2.12.4a-b

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