Faith Ringgold, who died Saturday at age 93, was an artist of protean inventiveness. Painter, sculptor, weaver, performer, writer and social justice activist, she creates work in which the personal and political are tightly intertwined. And much of that work gained popularity among audiences who did not frequent galleries and museums. This was particularly true of her series of semi-autobiographical painted narrative quilts depicting scenes of African American urban childhood, subject matter that easily translated into children’s picture books, for which, over the years, Ringgold published many.
All in all, his added up to a landmark-status career. But the art establishment, as defined by major museums, big auction houses and some talent-hogging galleries, doesn’t know what to do with it, or with him. So they did nothing. No mega-surveys, no million-dollar corporate commissions, no Venice Biennale-type canonizations.
Recently, however, very deep in the day, came a serious increase in attention. In 2016, the Museum of Modern Art finally brought Ringgold into its collection by acquiring several pieces from the early part of his career. One of them is a monumental 1967 painting titled “American People Series #20: Die.” It shows a crowd of panic-stricken men, women and children, white and Black, screaming and bleeding, and stampeding in all directions as if under deadly attack from an unseen force.
It is useful to remember where Ringgold stood in his life when he painted the picture. Born in Harlem, he had a classical art education, taught public school art, and painted what he himself described as Impressionist-style landscapes. He also reads James Baldwin, listens to the news, and sees America’s racial politics shift from passive resistance during the civil rights era to a new assertive Black power. The country was on red alert, as it is now, and his art responded to the emergency by being topical.
In the paintings he calls the “American People Series,” of which “Die” is one, white and Black people appear together, but with skewed balances of power made clear. In an early picture, “The Civil Rights Triangle” from 1963five men in business suits, four Black, one white, form a pyramid, with a white man at the top, indicating that until the civil rights movement was approved by whites, it was also controlled by whites.
In “Die,” the latest picture in the series, an all-out war breaks out, even beyond being an obvious race war. All the figures in the picture look equally stunned and traumatized by the bloodbath they have seen.
And for Ringgold at this time, art itself was more than just a seismic recorder of a culture. It also became a vehicle for path clearing and ethical promotion. He organized protests against the exclusion of Black artists from top museums, and designed posters in support of Attica prisoners and activist Angela Davis. In a series of paintings called “Black Light,” he removed the white pigment from his palette and mixed black with all his colors. By the 1970s, she was convinced that Black liberation and women’s liberation were inseparable causes. In 1971 she painted a mural for what was then the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island.
He knows that the country he lives in is an active, murderous madman. For an artist to find a voice for that madness, to get the pitch of madness right, is unusual and brave. For that artist to be Black and female was more than unusual, and was met with pushback from many sources, most of them in the art world itself.
The kind of painting he wanted — figurative, narrative, polemical — was out of fashion with the establishment, which in the ’60s proclaimed abstraction as the only “serious” aesthetic mode. (Even within Black art there is debate over whether modern art, Black or otherwise, should admit that political content is alive and well.) And his work continues to run against the grain throughout the Minimalists. and Conceptualist years. It was only recently, that figurative painting was so fashionable, that his work gained something like market currency.
And over the decades, he continued to develop in new directions. Her formal methods became more craft-intensive, including weaving, sewing and carving. His political content is drawn less from the news and more from art history and his own life. His determination to share this content, often resolutely Black-positive in tone, with young audiences 20 published children’s books is unique in contemporary art annals.
The full range of these developments is presented in an overdue retrospective, “Faith Ringgold: American People,” organized by the New Museum in 2022. But return to Ringgold at MoMA in 2019.
For the opening of its newly expanded premises, the museum completely remodeled, from top to bottom, its permanent collection galleries, and “Die,” a relatively recent arrival, was chosen for inclusion. On top of that, it was awarded a starring role. It shares an otherwise sparsely installed gallery with MoMA’s main attraction, Picasso’s 1907 “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” a confrontational image of five nude Catalan prostitutes who with carved bodies and faces like African masks.
The two paintings are placed cater-corner in the gallery, so you can take them together at a glance. Both are violent. (The colonialist implications of “Demoiselles” have been well noted, and art historians have read the picture as, among other things, an expression of men’s fear of the sex.) Both register as searingly political, while leaving their precise politics unclear. Paired with MoMA, they seem to visually and conceptually duke it out.
For me, Ringgold — an avowed Picasso fan — won the battle. But what really matters is that he is just there, focused on the center of the ground zero institution of Western Modernism, and his most radical image. I admire Ringgold’s later art, much of it materially innovative and expressively buoyant. But it’s the early work, from the pivotal period that made “Die,” that I keep coming back to.
What he did, in those first paintings, was put aside all the conventional art tools he had studied, the beauty of them (he would eventually reclaim them), to face the world as it really was, including an art world that has no use for her — a Black woman — and, in fact, forces everyone to dislike her.
Some artists are able to leap over walls. Picasso is one. And some tunnel under those walls, hit the resistance, tunnel more and, inside, open a door for others to enter. That’s what Faith Ringgold, artist-activist to the end, did.
