Excerpted from Marc Fasanella, Ralph Fasanella: Portraits of American Life (forthcoming):

My father was keenly aware of what it means to be an American. Having grown up in the economic and political cauldron of New York’s little Italy just after the turn of the century, and then moved as a teenager to the cultural as well as physical expansiveness of the Bronx, he formed a keen awareness of immigrant life. At the age of twenty-three, he shipped off for France to join the Spanish Civil war with a group of ideologically motivated military volunteers. By the time he returned from Spain in 1938, he had gained a political and economic education of profound depth. My father’s political education revealed to him the outlines of how a nation-state is formed, and how a corporate and military oligarchy orchestrates a national identity to their own benefit. In his painting American Heritage, he draws upon this political insight into national identity and the economic machinations that create it, to display the internal workings, showmanship, and drama that surround Washington politics. I vividly remember him working on the painting surrounded by the political ephemera of the era. Labor history and civil rights buttons and leaflets, anti-Vietnam war placards, and Kennedy assassination, as well as Watergate newspaper and magazine clippings littered the walls and surfaces of his large studio. At the center of the painting is a flag-draped coffin, presumably that of John F. Kennedy, but in many ways it is iconic of all the elaborate state funerals that are used to draw a nation together and focus attention away from the geopolitical forces that shape it. Above the coffin, shown inside the White House, enjoying the advantage of their position and rank, are members of the military-industrial cabal manipulating international and national affairs to their financial gain. The central coffin is surrounded by many other coffins in a clock-like arrangement, from a pine box above to the coffins of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg below. The Rosenbergs, depicted surrounded by their books, were executed in 1953 by the Federal government as a chilling message to the leftwing movement and the many secular Jewish workers and intellectuals who populated the American left throughout the McCarthy era. The coffins of Julius and Ethel are draped with flags because my father did not want the political right wing to take ownership of the American identity. To the lower left a flag also adorns the coffin of Bernard "Bunny" Ruck, attended by family and friends; just above this scene, to the right, is a coffin wrapped in a flag at an African American funeral that is being both photographed and sniped at by the cameraman to their right. Above them, just to the left, is Martin Luther King’s coffin, bearing a flag and carried by a military escort as his corpse is about to be placed on a mule cart. The Founders and presidents memorialized across the fascia of the White House may have played an essential role in forming the recognized history of the American identity, but so too do the signatories surrounding the "We the People" inscription at the lower portion of the pediment. I think my signature may be on that small panel of the painting as well as those of others who visited his studio and the names of those he grew up with. To either side of the White House, in the upper portions, are protesters doing their utmost to end the Vietnam War. At the bottom is a pantheon of Americans who also deserve to be memorialized as American icons. I remember my father painting this section over and over again trying to decide who should be lionized in this way. He finally settled on the names now recorded but the list of everyday Americans he found important and would include in a depiction of America’s heritage was far too large to incorporate into any number of canvases.

Stacy C. Hollander, “Ralph Fasanella,” exhibition brochure for American Perspectives: Stories from the American Folk Art Museum Collection (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2020).