Faith Ringgold: American People

About

The New Museum presents New York’s first full retrospective of the art of Faith Ringgold (b. 1930, New York, NY). Bringing together over sixty years of work, “Faith Ringgold: American People” provides the most comprehensive assessment to date of Ringgold’s impactful vision. Artist, author, educator, and organizer, Faith Ringgold links the multi-disciplinary achievements of the Harlem Renaissance to the political art of young Black artists working today. During the 1960s, Ringgold created some of the most indelible art of the civil rights era, melding her own unique style of figurative painting with a bold, transformative approach to the language of protest. In subsequent decades, she challenged accepted hierarchies of art and craft through her experimental quilt paintings and undertook a deeply studied reimagining of art history, producing narratives that bear witness to the historical sacrifices and achievements of Black Americans.

This exhibition features works from across Ringgold’s best-known series, tracking the development of her figurative style as it evolved and expanded to meet the urgency of the political and social changes taking place in America during her lifetime. Using what the artist described as a “super-realist” visual language, Ringgold captured the racial and gender divisions in 1960s American society with searing insight. Her large-scale “murals”—including the celebrated American People Series #20: Die (1967), recently juxtaposed with Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon at The Museum of Modern Art—will be shown alongside her iconic political posters advocating support for the Black Panther Party and freeing activist Angela Davis, among other collective causes.

The exhibition will also examine Ringgold’s embrace of non-Western and craft traditions—including her performance objects and “soft sculptures”—which demonstrate her attempts to transcend the predominately white art historical tradition to find more suitable forms for her radical exploration of gender and racial identity. Although lesser known within Ringgold’s oeuvre, these works led directly to the creation of her best-known, story quilt paintings of the 1980s and 1990s.

Among the most influential artworks of the past fifty years, Ringgold’s story quilts draw on both personal autobiography and collective histories. The story quilts point to larger social conditions and cultural transformations, from the Harlem Renaissance to the realities of Ringgold’s life as a working mother, artist, and activist. This retrospective includes a wide range of Ringgold’s quilts, including formative pieces created with her mother; important early series like The Bitter Nest and Change; and the largest selection to date of her historic series, The French Collection and The American Collection. Together, these story quilts position the artist’s own personal and professional biography in dialogue with key moments in art history and the larger narrative of the African American experience across the twentieth century.

Co-published with Phaidon, the exhibition catalogue will be the most significant collection of scholarship on Ringgold’s work to date, with new contributions by curators, writers, and artists across generations, including Diedrick Brackens, LeRonn Brooks, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jordan Casteel, Bridget Cooks, Mark Godfrey, Lucy Lippard, Tschabalala Self, Michele Wallace, and Zoé Whitley, among others. This fully illustrated publication will focus on all aspects of Ringgold’s career—the range of contributors speaks to the wide variety of audiences her work has reached over the past fifty years. Long overdue, this retrospective will provide a timely opportunity to appreciate a critical voice in the history of American art.

“Faith Ringgold: American People” is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, and Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator.