Faith Ringgold, who died Saturday at age 93, was an artist of ever-changing creativity. A painter, sculptor, weaver, performer, writer, and social justice activist, she has created her work in which the personal and the political are tightly woven together. And many of her works have become popular among audiences who do not frequent her galleries or museums. This is especially true in her narrative quilt series of semi-autobiographical paintings depicting scenes from her childhood in an African-American town. The subject matter was easily translated into illustrated children's books, many of which Ringgold published over the years.
Overall, she has had a groundbreaking career. But the art world, defined by her major museums, high-priced auction houses, and a few galleries hogging her talent, had no idea what to do with this work of art and her. So they did nothing. There are no large-scale surveys, no million-dollar corporate commissions, no Venice Biennale-style canonization.
But of late there has been a serious uptick in interest. In 2016, the Museum of Modern Art finally included Ringgold in its collection, having acquired several works from early in his career. One of them was a monumental 1967 painting titled “American People Series #20: Die.” It shows crowds of terrified white and black men, women and children screaming, bleeding and running in all directions as if under a deadly attack from an invisible force.
It's useful to remember where Ringgold was in her life when she painted. A Harlem native, she had a classical art training, and while she was teaching art in public schools, she was painting what she described as impressionist-style landscapes. She was also reading James Baldwin, listening to the news, and watching America's racial politics shift from the passive resistance of the civil rights era to a newly assertive black force. As today, the country was in crisis, and her art responded to the emergency by creating buzz.
The paintings she calls the ‘American Series’ include ‘Die’, which features white and black people together, but with a clearly distorted balance of power. An early photograph from 1963, “The Civil Rights Triangle,” shows five men in business suits (four black, one white) forming a pyramid with the white man at the top, suggesting that the civil rights movement was to some extent a white man's Indicates that approval has been received. , it was also controlled as white.
In 'Die,' the culmination of the series, a full-scale war broke out beyond the obvious racial war. All of the people in the photo appear equally shocked and traumatized by the bloodbath they are subjected to.
And for Ringgold during this period, art itself was more than a seismic recorder of culture. It has also become a vehicle for trailblazing and ethical advocacy. She organized protests against the exclusion of black artists from major museums and designed posters supporting Attica inmate and activist Angela Davis. In a series of paintings called 'Black Light', she removed white pigment from her palette and mixed black into all the colors. In the 1970s, she became convinced that black liberation and women's liberation were inseparable causes. In 1971, she painted a mural at the then Women's House of Detention on Rikers Island.
She knew that the country she lived in was murderously active and crazy. It was a unique and daring task for an artist to find the voice of that madness and to express its tones correctly. That the artist was black and female was more than unusual and she received backlash from many sources, most of which were within her art world itself.
The kind of painting she favored – figurative, storytelling, polemical – was unfashionable in the '60s, when the establishment promoted abstraction as the only “serious” aesthetic mode. (Even within the black art world, there is debate about whether modern art, black or otherwise, should be acknowledged as having a very vivid political content.) And her work continued to defy the mold throughout the Minimalist and Conceptualist eras. Only recently, as figurative painting became very popular, did her work gain market value.
And over the decades, she continued to develop in new directions. Her formal means became increasingly craft-intensive, including weaving, sewing, and carving. Her political content drew more from her art history and her own life than from her news. Her determination to share this content with young audiences through 20 published children's books is almost unique in the annals of contemporary art.
The full scope of these developments was on display in “Faith Ringgold: American People,” an overdue retrospective hosted by the New Museum in 2022. But back to Ringgold at MoMA in 2019.
For the opening of the newly expanded building, the museum re-hung its permanent collection galleries from top to bottom, and the relatively recent arrival “Die” was chosen to be included. It was more than just a starring role. It shared a sparsely installed gallery with MoMA's main attraction, Picasso's 1907 “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.” The work is a confrontational image of a nude Catalan prostitute with an African mask-like face and mutilated body.
The two paintings were placed in the gallery's catering corner so they could be viewed together at a glance. Both are violent. (The colonial implications of ‘Demoiselles’ are well known, and art historians have interpreted the painting as, among other things, a representation of male sexual panic.) Both register as extremely political, but their exact politics is unclear. Paired with MoMA, they seemed like a good fit both visually and conceptually.
For my part, Ringgold, a fan of Picasso, won the race. But what was really important was that she had the most radical image at the heart of the ground zero institutions of Western modernism. I admire Ringgold's later art, much of which is materially innovative and expressive. But what I keep looking back at is
What she was able to do in those early paintings was to set aside all the traditional art tools she had learned, not least beauty (which she would later reclaim) and see the world as it was. It was an art world that was of no use to her as a black woman, in fact fortified to keep her and everyone like her out.
Some artists even go beyond walls. Picasso was one of them. And some tunnels beneath those walls meet resistance, and more tunnels are drilled, and once inside, they open the door for others to come in. That's what artist and activist Faith Ringgold did until the end.