My Country Needs Me, 1996
Offset Lithograph
Edition of 80
21 1/4 x 30 in
Collaborative Printer: Bob Franklin
At the top of this print, a line of text reads: My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented. The words come from Hortense Spillers' landmark essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," a foundational text in African American feminist literary criticism on the origins and abuse of racial and gender-based language. Below them, a disjointed face — a composite of a Black boxer and an African mask — emerges from a background of horizontal stripes that unmistakably evokes the American flag.
Rodney Ewing built this work around a single, urgent question: who controls the image of the Black body in America? Media, history, fiction, and science have long supplied their own answers. With this print, Ewing refuses those answers and offers one of his own. The result is a work that is at once confrontational and deeply considered, asking the viewer to sit with the weight of what it means to be defined by forces outside yourself, and what it looks like to reclaim that definition.
