Faith Ringgold: Two Moments.
In March of 1971, the Art Students League of New York held a pair of consecutive panels on identity and revolution—“The Black Artist” on March 2, and two weeks later, “Women’s Liberation and the Arts.” Both talks were empaneled with stars—Hale Woodruff and Norman Lewis1 spoke on the former, with the critic Lucy Lippard and artists Sylvia Stone and Kate Millet2—but the two panels featured one speaker who sat on both: the artist, thinker, activist, and children’s book author, Faith Ringgold.
II. Articles of Faith.
You could say that Ringgold was having a moment when the League asked her to speak at this pair of panels. From 1963 the 1967, the Harlem-born artist labored over the stirring, sweeping, stridently-deadpanned American People series. It’s a series insomuch as the works share a meditative theme of America’s violent racism, but format and content are hardly uniform. From the modestly scaled nouveau-Munch-ish early portraits of dour figures to the Guernica-esque Die, American People is coherent but hardly a piece of narrative illustration. Of the American People series, Ringgold later remarked:
“I became fascinated with the ability of art to document the time, place, and cultural identity of the artist. How could I, as an African American woman artist, document what was happening around me?”
Die is terrifying, bleak, and morally confounding: MoMA acquired its mural-scaled nightmare and hung it, compellingly,3 next to Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon—and though Ringgold considered it potentially prophetic, it’s hard to say what she was foretelling beyond mayhem and violence. (Maybe that’s enough; some days it seems like she was right). Ringgold had found her voice and her audience—if not an eager market.
III. Riker’s Island.
As that series came to a close, Stephen Radich, art dealer, was himself grappling with the times.4 Radich had shown George Sugarman and Yayoi Kusama, and now mounted an exhibition by Marc Morrel in which the American flag was used to unflattering effect to protest the Vietnam War. Radich was arrested for “casting contempt” on the American flag—Morrel was neither charged nor much remembered5—and as Radich’s case worked its way through the Supreme Court, gallerists and artists grappling with their circumstances—and the nature of speech—all felt the chill.
One of Ringgold’s American People paintings walked similar terrain: The Flag is Bleeding, as the title suggests, features a bleeding American flag, with wounded Americans bleeding on it. It’s a compositional riff on Jasper Johns’ flag paintings of a decade prior,6 but with that “document of time and place” mapped onto it. You might have thought that the First Amendment was settled law—Ringgold, Johns, and Morrel clearly did—but Radich’s arrest suggested otherwise. Ringgold curated an exhibition at Judson Memorial Church in protest. Shortly thereafter, the exhibition was raided, Ringgold was arrested, and, with threats of more arrests to come, Judson determined not to reopen the exhibition.7
When the case reached the Supreme Court, it got a tie vote; it was finally decided by an appellate court, in Radich’s favor. But by that time Radich’s gallery had closed; he continued on as a private dealer. Ringgold left the encounter with a swagger—and promptly won a grant to execute a mural for the Women’s house of detention on Riker’s Island.
III. Juggling Acts.
The Riker’s Island commission was recently moved to the Brooklyn Museum8; Die is now at MoMA, and the National Gallery acquired The Flag is Bleeding. Ringgold has recently had another ‘moment.’ (I was delighted to attend the Art Student League’s 2022 Gala at MoMA which honored Ringgold).
But though it looks obvious now, those moments were very hard-won. Roberta Smith, who retired last month from her role as champion of artists that need and deserve one, is often quoted for her 2013 remark about Ringgold:
“She has spent more than five decades juggling message and form, high and low, art and craft, inspirational narrative and quiet or not so quiet fury about racial and sexual inequality.”9
Smith wasn’t wrong, but the metaphor of juggling suggests an indecisiveness that I don’t readily associate with the painter of Die. Consider Ringgold’s remarks about The Flag is Bleeding:
“You notice there is no Black woman in the picture. The white woman was trying to bring the Black and white man together because she really had no power, and the only way to acquire it was by bringing together the men. Black women were literally out of the picture, period. It took decades before people realized that we existed.”10
Ringgold used many different instruments to play her music, but whether in tapestry, illustration, installation, or on canvas, it is always clearly her own. Juggling, of course, doesn’t mean a lack of commitment, but when I think of those two panels at the Art Students League in 1971, it seems like it is we—the community of marketing, criticizing, collecting, and distributing artworks—that are doing the juggling. Where to place this clarion voice when our categories are so divisive and incomplete?
We’re left with the question, and the magisterial body of work. Faith Ringgold died on April 12 at the age of 93.
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
Jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
Read more about Hale Woodruff and Norman Lewis’s group, Spiral, in our article here.
It feels reductive to call Millet an artist when she was also a prolific writer and theorist—but there’s nothing “mere” about being an artist, so I’ll just leave it at that.
Holland Cotter felt that Pablo won the match, but enlightened minds may disagree.
Ken Johnson, “Stephen Radich, Owner of Controversial Art Gallery, Is Dead at 85,” The New York Times, Dec. 26, 2007, here.
Hilton Kramer testified that Morrel’s works were indeed art, but not necessarily very good. Ouch.
Johns’ Flag paintings began in 1954 (that early!?), and we’ve got an upcoming post about Johns that you won’t want to miss.
Zachary Small, “Faith Ringgold Mural at Rikers Island to Move to Brooklyn Museum,” The New York Times, Jan. 19, 2022, here.
Roberta Smith, “‘Faith Ringgold’s America: Early Works and Story Quilts,” The New York Times, April 11, 2013, here.
Holland Cotter, Faith Ringgold’s Path of Maximum Resistance, The New York Times.