WALLACE: But you did manage to do some caricatures of Donald Trump, which you haven’t shown to anyone yet. So there was just very little inspiration. And the worst part was that I was cut off from the world in a way that my art depends upon. RASHID JOHNSON: Did you make art in quarantine? RINGGOLD: I don’t mind not coming back if I’m going to be a dog or a cat. MICHELE WALLACE: What about reincarnation? ![]() SONNY ROLLINS: Do you believe in life after death?įAITH RINGGOLD: No. (A corresponding monograph by Phaidon serves as an excellent historical refresher on her influence.) We invited 18 artists, writers, musicians, actors, and filmmakers to ask this American legend a range of questions, which she answered at her home in New Jersey, with the help of her older daughter, the writer and activist Michele Wallace. ![]() This spring, the New Museum is presenting the first New York retrospective of Ringgold’s 60 years of art-making, a treasure trove of painting, sculpture, and fabric works that reveals just how far ahead of her time she was-and, yet, also critically necessary to her time. ![]() Her legacy includes being arrested for desecration of the American flag while participating in a group show in 1970, creating a mural for the Correctional Institution for Women on Rikers Island, protesting the exclusion of Black and female artists at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, forming a number of key groups to foster the wider recognition of Black artists, and-a crucial subject in her work being family-becoming a mother to two accomplished daughters. Arguably no other artist in the past century has been able to combine aesthetics with political impact like the radical, visually resourceful Harlem native whose work, too long overlooked by the white establishment, runs from moody portraits and dynamic, often violent figurative paintings in the 1960s, to her iconic narrative quilt paintings of “tar beach” roofs and family gatherings in the 1980s.Īlong the way, Ringgold, still at work today at age 91, became an outspoken figure for Civil Rights, antiracism, the antiwar movement, women’s rights, and the representation of Black women in and outside the art world. For those who believe that artists can be activists, that their work can truly reach beyond small complacent audiences and instigate real social change, there is one patron saint: Faith Ringgold.
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