Faith Ringgold_ENG

BILDMUSEET 27/08 202010/01 2021

FAITH RINGGOLD/

ENG

27/08 10/01

FAITH RINGGOLD /

INTRODUCTION

As an artist, activist and writer, Faith Ringgold has challenged injustices and prejudices for over five decades. Growing up in Harlem, New York in the light of the creative era called Harlem Renaissance, Faith Ringgold has since the early 1960’s worked as an artist. In her work, she draws inspiration from several visual and cultural sources; early European modernism, African masks as well as traditional quilts and their place in the history of slavery.

This exhibition is the first survey with Faith Ringgold in Europe and presents paintings, posters and textile works from the 1960’s to the 2000’s. From her early paintings visualising the American civil rights movement to her political and feminist activism and later autobiographical textile works and quilts, Faith Ringgold has always been in the centre of contemporary debate.

It begins with the American People series, a collection of paintings depicting the social injustices and racial tensions she witnessed during the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power era.

During the 1970’s she embraced feminism and became politically more active. She led protests against museums in New York, protesting the lack of women and black artists in their collections and exhibitions. She later designed and spread political posters and organised exhibitions such as The Peoples Flag Show, for which she was arrested.

During the second half the 1970’s Faith Ringgold moved away from oil painting and instead started making her first works on unstretched canvases, inspired by Tibetan Buddhist paintings called tankas. Several of these tankas are part of the exhibition.

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It was from these tankas Faith Ringgold moved towards making quilts. In quilting, she saw a new way of expressing herself, combining images with text and at the same time honouring a tradition of quilting passed down on the female side of the family by her great-great-grandmother, who was born into slavery.

The later quilts, like the series Coming to Jones Road and American Collection speak about the physical and social journey many slaves made on the Underground Railroad, a secret network of roads and safe houses that were used by slaves fleeing from the South to the freedom in the North. As cultural assumptions and prejudices persists in society, Faith Ringgold’s work retains its contemporary resonance.

The exhibition is produced by the Serpentine Galleries, London and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Melissa Blanchflower.

Responsible for the exhibition at Bildmuseet is museum curator Anders Jansson.

Thanks to Fort Knox.

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BIOGRAPHY

Faith Ringgold (b. 1930 in Harlem, New York) is an artist, lecturer and author of numerous award-winning children’s books. She received her BS and MA degrees in visual art from City College of New York in 1955 and 1959. Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of California in San Diego, Ringgold has received 23 Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees. She is the recipient of more than 80 awards and honours including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, The American Academy of Arts and Letters Award and recently the Medal of Honour for Fine Arts from the National Arts Club. In 2017, Ringgold was elected as a member into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston.

Ringgold’s works has been shown in group exhibitions such as Soul of A Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern, London (2017), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (2018) and Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York (2019); We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965 – 1985, Brooklyn Museum (2017); Post-Picasso Contemporary Reactions, Museo Picasso, Barcelona (2014) and the solo exhibition American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold’s Paintings of the 1960’s at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC (2013).

Ringgold’s work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and The Brooklyn Museum, all in New York, as well as the collections of The National Museum of American Art, Washington DC; The Art Institute of Chicago and The Boston Museum of Fine Art.

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FAITH RINGGOLD /

SELECTED WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

They Speak No Evil, 1963 They Speak No Evil is the earliest work by Faith Ringgold that is shown in the exhibition. The painting shows six white men, with minimalistic bodies and faces, standing in front of a tinted window, as if they were standing in a church. The title suggests that although they have not said anything evil, they may have done something evil. Faith Ringgold has referred to Sunday morning as being the most segregated day and time in the United States, as a lot of people worship but do so separately of race.

A Man Kissing His Wife, 1964 The painting may seem as an innocent image, a man kissing his wife on the cheek. Today it can be hard to comprehend how provocative this image could be pervieved in 1964. But as the man is black and the woman is white, this work was shocking to a lot of people. When the work was painted, the United States still had active laws in place to keep black and white citizens segregated, including public transport, restaurants, public toilets and public schools.

American People #6: Mr Charlie, 1964 Mr Charlie is an expression used by Afro-Americans to refer to slave owners. The phrase was picked up by the Civil Rights

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Movement and came to refer to a white man with power. In the painting, Mr Charlie is an older man, dressed in a suit and with an insincere smile on his face. The same year as she painted this work, Faith Ringgold had seen the play Blues for Mister Charlie that was written as a response to the murder of Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers in 1963.

American People #9: The American Dream, 1964 A large red arrow points down to the large diamond ring a woman, who appears to be both black and white, wears on her finger. The title of the work does not seem to refer to the material wealth we often associate with the American dream.

Instead the artist seems to aspire to racial integration while simultaneously highlighting the role of wealth in establishing social classes and segregation.

American People #14: A Portrait of an American Youth, 1964 Faith Ringgold has spoken about how she modelled the man in this portrait after her brother Andrew, who died young from a drug overdose in 1961. In the painting he seems very polite but he is surrounded by downward pointing arrows, stop signs and the characteristic profile of Mr Charlie, the symbol for a racist system that diminishes black people’s chances of succeeding in life.

American People #15: Hide Little Children, 1966 This work was created when Faith Ringgold’s daughters Barbara and Michele started attending the integrated school New Lincoln.

The painting shows five children with their faces obscured by the trees they are hiding behind. Perhaps they are playing hide and seek, or perhaps they are hiding from racism. In this work, and many others by Ringgold, the trees represent a form of safe haven and security.

American People #19: US Postage Commemorating the Advent of Black Power, 1967 During the summer of 1967, Faith Ringgold was working on her first solo show and painted, for the first time, in larger format.

She completed three large paintings: The Flag is Bleeding, Die and US Postage Commemorating the Advent of Black Power. In the latter work, that is part of the exhibition, Ringgold has painted 100 sets of eyes and noses in a grid pattern within the frame of a stamp. The concept of over-sizing a commonplace object and the repetition of faces acknowledges the strategies of Pop art and in particular the work of Andy Warhol. At the time of this work was made, ten percent of the American population was black and Ringgold has visualised this statistic by painting ten Afro-American faces in a diagonal across the canvas. That line is crossed by the words BLACK POWER, forming a X. In contrast, the words WHITE POWER is horizontally encrypted in white paint over the composition. The phrase Black Power was coined

by Stokely Carmichael, one of the leaders of the Black Panthers.

Faith Ringgold has spoken about how hard this painting was to make. “[…] in many ways, I had no idea what Black Power meant. My own need to feel a sense of personal as well as public power was in direct contrast to the world that ignored women of all races. For me, the concept of Black Power carried with it a big question mark. Was it intended only for the black men or would black women have power too?”

Black Light #9: American Spectrum, 1969 Faith Ringgold started working on the Black Light series in 1967, two years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Ringgold has said that American Spectrum shows six face masks that in a subtle way tells about black people’s multiethnical heritage. Originally the work was named Six Shades of Black which gives the work a different meaning. Six Shades of Black was to show that ‘black’ people come in many different colours, while as American Spectrum speaks about how the Unites States consists of both white people and people of colour.

The Peoples Flag Show, 1971 Judson 3, 1970 In 1970, Faith Ringgold, Jean Toche and Jon Hendricks organised The Peoples Flag Show, an exhibition at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, New York as a “challenge to the repressive laws governing the so-called flag desecration”

and to protest against “American oppression and repression at home and abroad”. The exhibition featured works by more than 200 artists including Yvonne Rainer and Jasper Johns. Faith Ringgold designed the poster and her daughter Michele Wallece, aged 18, wrote the words. Together with the other organisers, Ringgold was arrested and fined 100 dollars. By then they were known as the Judson 3. Flag burning and desecration of the flag was de-criminalised by the US Supreme Court in 1989 on the grounds of the First Amendment.

United States of Attica, 1971–72 The poster United States of Attica was made to commemorate what Faith Ringgold calls the Attica Prison rebellion, and what was known in the media as the Attica Prison riot. For a long time, prisoners had demanded better living conditions and political rights and on 9 September, 1971, 1281 of the 2200 inmates rebelled and took control of the prison, keeping 42 employees as hostage. After four days of negotiating, the government had agreed to most demands except the demand for amnesty for the uprising. Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered the police to storm the prison resulting in at least 43 deaths, including 10 correctional officers and civilians as well as 33 inmates. Authorities accused the inmates for causing all the deaths, despite an investigation later showed that only one of the officers and four inmates killed could be attributed to the prisoners.

Faith Ringgold’s poster shows a red, black and green map of the United States, on which deaths throughout American history

are accounted for. She lists attacks on the indigenous population and the great American wars including the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Indian Wars, Vietnam and Korea, World War I and II, the Spanish-American War and the Mexican-American War. She also lists My-Lai, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, lynching, murdered Civil Rights activists, witch burnings, race riots and slave rebellions, as well as the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Ringgold uses the figure of 40 million to account for the deaths caused by slavery. That number includes those who were lost on the voyages from Africa. She writes: “This map of American violence is incomplete. Please write in whatever you find lacking”.

Feminist Series, 1972–93 During the fall of 1972 Faith Ringgold began working the Feminist Series. It is a series of paintings inspired by Tibetan Buddhist paintings called tankas that she had seen on the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Paintings on unstretched canvases with textile boarders, she created 20 paintings that all have quotes from prominent, black Civil Rights activists throughout history.

Mother’s Quilt, 1983 Faith Ringgold made her first quilt in 1980. The work, Echos of Harlem, was made together with her mother, Willi Posey,

who worked as a fashion designer. The quilt Mother’s Quilt, is from 1983 and was done while mourning her mother’s death in 1981. It is made using pieces of fabric they had saved for future collaborations. The composition comprises nine dolls, a mother and her eight daughters.

Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?, 1983 Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima? is from 1983 and the first and only quilt Faith Ringgold made entirely by hand and by herself. Traditionally, quilting is made in groups.

Aunt Jemima is a well-recognised commercial brand, perhaps best known for the pancake mix, that has been around since the late 1800’s. Faith Ringgold recognised that she could reconfigure Aunt Jemima as an icon and a role model for other women. In this quilt, Faith Ringgold tells her own story about Aunt Jemima, about her parents were slaves that bought their freedom and how Aunt Jemima became a business woman and prosperous entrepreneur. The quilt features portraits of the main characters, Aunt Jemima, her husband Rufus, her parents, children and their spouses, interspersed with texts. In the boarders you can see Aunt Jemima in different ensembles, dresses, headwraps, hats and haircuts. These images have hand-sewn details such as earrings and eyes.

Aunt Jemima is a central character in Faith Ringgold’s storytelling and someone she has returned to on numerous occasions.

American Collection #6: The Flag is Bleeding #2, 1997 The Flag is Bleeding #2 is number six in the American Collection series. It is one of several works in which Faith Ringgold uses the American flag to contextualise the problems she sees threatening the American society. It is the second work with the title The Flag is Bleeding. The first one was made in 1967, as a part of the American People series, and shows a black man with a knife, a white woman and an armed white man peering through a bleeding flag, a confrontation of violence and racial tension. As a contrast, this work visualises a black woman protecting her children. She appears to be bleeding from her heart and at the same time blood is dripping from the flag.

When Faith Ringgold made the first work she left out any black women from the image as they were not a significant part of the Black Power-movement. Thirty years later she wanted to credit them with their important domestic role during that era.

American Collection #1: We Came to America, 1997 The first quilt in the series American Collection is called We Came to America, and speaks about the many African’s forced migration to America, about slavery and broken promises of democracy. In the foreground we see a black Statue of Liberty, her hair in dreadlocks and with a child on one arm and a burning torch in the other hand. In the water we see several black people that, on the one hand are fighting for the lives and

on the other seems to reach for the heavens, hoping death shall relieve them from their suffering. In the background is a burning slave ship.

Given the ship, it is not hard to think about a connection between this work and the British painter J.M.W. Turner’s famous painting The Slave Ship from 1840. Originally, Turner’s painting was called Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On. To Faith Ringgold’s quilt there was originally a story written that never got published.

It tells the story about Marlena, a fictional artist, who crosses the Atlantic with her brother onboard a slave ship. During the journey, Marlena has a dream in which the slaves walks on the water back to Africa while joyfully celebrating their freedom.

American Collection #9: The Two Jemimas, 1997 The work The Two Jemimas is to some parts inspired by Willem de Koonings painting Two Women in the Country from 1954. As part of the abstract expressionism movement, de Kooning painted the naked bodies with powerful, almost violent, brushstrokes. Faith Ringgold have spoken about how she found them ugly, nightmarish and threatening. It was an image of the female body that evoked similar emotions like the ones she felt when she saw stereotypical images of black faces, like Aunt Jemima on the boxes of pancake mix.

Faith Ringgold makes a difference between images of black people meant to be hurtful and her use of blackness as something “strong” and “bold”. The Two Jemimas is a work that is somewhat ambivalent when it comes to what side of these opposites it belongs to.

Faith Ringgold admits that no white artist would paint black women in this way, by says that she has not tried to make them ugly in any way. Faith Ringgold has said: “[…] the minute you close their mouths and give them a silly smile, right away you are trying to atone for them not having all these things that pretty women are supposed to have.

So let their teeth show and just make everything as bold and wonderful and sexy as they be. Look how sexy they are.

They have got on short dresses. They have got big titties hanging. The are wearing jewellery. They are wearing highheel shoes. They are turned over, but so what?”

Coming to Jones Road Part 1 and Part 2, 2000–2010 In 1993 Faith Ringgold moved from New York to Englewood, New Jersey where she built a house and a new studio. first part of the series is partially based on the great resistance Ringgold experienced from her new, predominately white, neighbours. The works is also a celebration to the landscape in northern New Jersey where Ringgold currently resides and has her studio.

The exhibition features among other works Coming to Jones Road Part 1: #4 Under a Blood Red Sky from 2000. The work visualises a group of slaves, including a baby, and their journey towards freedom. The child has been named Freedom as she was born almost free. Ten years later, in 2010, Ringgold returned to the theme of Jones Road and created the Coming to Jones Road Part 2 series. In this series she also returned to her earlier work inspired by Tibetan tankas. The exhibition features portraits of Martin Luther King Jr, Sojourner Truth, a former slave who became a prominent abolitionist and women’s rights activist as well as Harriet Tubman, the Afro-American abolitionist who helped many slaves escape to freedom.

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LARISSA SANSOUR / HEIRLOOM

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FAITH RINGGOLD /

CREATIVE WORKSHOP

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AUDITORIUM LIBRARY CAFÉ / RESTAURANT

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