American People Series #18: The Flag is Bleeding by Faith Ringgold
Brooklyn Museum’s exhibit, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, features the work of over sixty black artists from 1963 to 1983, “one of the most politically, socially, and aesthetically revolutionary periods in American history.” Over 150 artworks in the exhibition address the unjust social conditions facing black Americans. These include Faith Ringgold’s painting of a “bleeding” flag (above). Ringgold, who was inspired by Amiri Baraka, one of the key leaders of the Black Arts Movement, developed a style that she called “super realism” to accurately depict the “oppression faced by Black people as viscerally as possible.” The exhibition is at the Brooklyn Museum through February 3, 2019.