To give some background on the digital image I created, I wanted to show the artwork that inspired mine. This last winter break, I went to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. While there, one of the exhibitions was “Now Then” by an artist named Ed Ruscha. Of his numerous works on display, this one stood out to me, and I took a picture of it.
(My personal picture of the painting).
This painting is called “Our Flag,” and Ruscha painted it in 2017, after the 2016 presidential election. When hearing about this final project, I knew I wanted to create something similar or use his painting of the flag in my artwork because of how it recently caught my attention.
This is the digital artwork I ended up making. So, I traced over the image and put a person in it as if they were in a museum looking at the painting. I wanted to make it as if someone in the future were to be looking at it. I made the person gray to not give them any identity, as if they are just a number. The person serves as a way to scan over the history of the American Dream and demonstrate how it has evolved over generations and varies depending upon perspective. I filled the wall that the painting is on with keyterms from this class. Specifically, keyterms from Killers of the Flower Moon and Black Wall Street. I also included a few from my personal research in Unit 3 about the reality of the American Dream for immigrants.
Based on this, I like to think that the flag represents these key terms. The flag is disintegrating apart, and its fragments are being blown to the right. I thought this could represent the passage of time and the change that comes along with it. Similar to how we saw the American Dream transform from a dream for a collective unit or society to an individual dream or hope in Unit 1, I thought the flag being shredded into individual pieces that are coming off the whole flag could represent this change in the construct of the American Dream.
The iconic American Dream is “the idea that every citizen of the United States has an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative.” The keyterms I put on the wall represent how the American Dream might change for future generations. I was mainly inspired by my Unit 3 research paper dealing with how the idea of the American Dream is misleading for immigrants. Doing my research, along with what we learned in Unit 2, showed me how someone’s dreams can be taken away, prevented, or warped based on their background. I see privileged Americans continuing to focus on becoming incredibly wealthy and attempting to keep people from immigrating to the United States. So, the flag being torn symbolizes the internal social or cultural tensions that expose the American Dream’s weakness in providing equal opportunity for all. Unless there are changes now, the stereotypical American Dream may become less believable and lose its power to inspire people in the future.