Faith Ringgold’s first major sale was in 1970. Chase Manhattan Bank almost bought “Flag for the Moon,” a painting that reminded them of a Jasper Johns — until they realized TheseStars and stripes were letters that represented a violent racial slur.
So instead they picked “The American Spectrum,” a row of abstract faces painted in a gradient of skin tones from dark to light. Part of her “Black Light Series,” begun in 1967, the piece uses darkened oil paints to render figures that look black against a white backdrop; but “viewed side by side, the different nuances of color become visible.” As Ringgold, her daughter Michele Wallace and Kirsten Weiss write in FAITH RINGGOLD – POLITICS / POWER (Weiss Publications, $49.95), the piece was originally called “Six Shades of Black,” but the new title “was deemed more amenable to collectors and less likely to encourage inconvenient questions about ethnic and racial representations.” The bank paid $3,000 for it, and still has it today.
But a name is just that, and as this book shows, all of Ringgold’s work in the ’60s and ’70s pushes the viewer toward just such questions: about the whiteness of women’s liberation, about the exclusion of Black artists from the establishment, about criminal justice. These oil paintings, collages and photos, as well as photographs and textiles, trace 25 years of American history through the eyes and experiences of a key figure from the Black Power and Black feminist movements. “I didn’t want people to be able to look, and look away,” she says. “I want to grab their eyes and hold them, because this is America.”
Created in 1970 for the majority-white Committee to Defend the Panthers (1970), this poster — a collage of paper, pencil and press type in the colors of the Pan-African flag and of the Black liberation movement — was seen as “too aggressive in a climate in which racial separatism and violence were a volatile subject, particularly for white people.”
Ringgold was born in Harlem in 1930. She is the youngest of three siblings of Willi Posey, a seamstress, and clothing designer. Ringgold began to use textiles to create wearable sculptures from important figures in her life in the 1970s.
Ringgold and five other Black women artists — Kay Brown, Jerrolyn Crooks, Pat Davis, Mai Mai Leabua and Dingda McCannon — formed the Where We At collective in 1971, in response to the male-dominated Black Arts movement and white-dominated mainstream feminism.
Named for the Attica prison inmates who died in a 1971 uprising in protest of the “deplorable conditions” there, “The United States of Attica” was Ringgold’s most widely distributed poster of the decade. A map of oppression in this country since the 1700s, the offset print includes “a laconic invitation to add further acts of violence,” which “emphasizes the historical continuity and ceaselessness of violence as a defining characteristic of the development of the United States of America.”
Lauren Christensen works as an editor at Book Review.
Source: NY Times
