The American Collection is a prominent example of Ringgold's artistic engagements and debates with the aesthetics, philosophies, and key figures of modernist art.

The quilts continue the story of Willia Marie Simone and her descendants that Ringgold began in The French Collection.

[3] Ringgold's daughter described the conceit of the series: The American Collection was intended to be composed of twelve pieces, one of which was never completed and all of which were to be understood as paintings done by Marlena, Willia Marie's adult daughter, as a successful Black woman artist living in the United States.

[4] We Came to America depicts the Statue of Liberty as a Black woman holding a small child, surrounded in the water by escaped formerly enslaved people.

Baker is depicted in five different dance poses, wearing her signature stage outfit of no clothes apart from a skirt made of bananas and a layered necklace.

Smith appears to be singing in the images, which are arranged and colored in the style of Andy Warhol's signature repetitive portraits like Marilyn Diptych (1962).

A Black woman stands in the left of the flag with several bleeding wounds on her chest and tears of blood streaming from her eyes.

The figures are wearing embroidered orange dresses and pearls, with skin ranging from deep blue to grayish black.

The two women are meant to be portraits of the blackface minstrel show character and longtime pancake syrup brand mascot Aunt Jemima.

[9] Wanted depicts the abolitionists and activists Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth standing together in a verdant forest.

[4] Reviewing Ringgold's 1998 exhibition at the New Museum, critic Grace Glueck wrote in The New York Times that "the American quilts -- without the customary narrative borders -- are starker, harder hitting and more strikingly composed than [The French Collection].

"[10] Critic Hettie Judah, writing in The Guardian about Ringgold's 2019 retrospective at the Serpentine Galleries, said that quilts from the series "recall the violence on which the US was constructed, and with which a dominant power structure is maintained.