Faith Ringgold Accessibility Consultation

Before reaching the exhibition entrance, there is a large wall to the left of the elevator doors. It is covered with wallpaper that echoes Faith Ringgold’s style. Triangles in black, light blue, salmon, deep red, and forest green are tiled to form a checkerboard of repeating diamonds. Each diamond is made up of two colors, its shape split in half or in quarters. On the other side of the atrium, across the exhibition entrance, the wall is painted black with large text in white which reads “Faith Ringgold: American People.”

The introductory text is located on a wall around the corner, at the entrance to the exhibition. The exhibition then continues through a doorway to the right of this text.

To the right of that doorway, if not entering the exhibition, there is a ledge with a railing which looks out onto the lower floors of the MCA. Across the gap, a room from later in this exhibition is visible with large televisions, a reading table, books, and headphones. The windows are covered with big blown-up archival images of Faith Ringgold.

Introduction

Faith Ringgold’s (b. 1930, Harlem, NY; lives in Englewood, NJ) role as an artist, author, educator, and organizer has made her a legendary figure in the worlds of art and activism. Her decades-spanning practice links the multidisciplinary achievements of the Harlem Renaissance to the politically engaged art of young artists working today. During the 1960s, Ringgold created some of the most indelible art of the civil rights era by melding her unique style of figurative painting with 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 to produce narratives that bear witness to the complexity of life in the United States.

This exhibition features sixty years of works from across Ringgold’s best-known series, tracing the development of her figurative style and political concerns as they evolved and expanded to meet the urgency of the social changes taking place in the United States during her lifetime. In the adjoining galleries near the end of the exhibition, a selection of works from the MCA Collection showcases the ways artists across generations share affinities with Ringgold’s expansive and influential practice.

The MCA presentation of Faith Ringgold: American People is curated by Jamillah James, Manilow Senior Curator, with Jack Schneider, Assistant Curator. The exhibition was originally organized by the New Museum, New York, and curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, and Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator, with Madeline Weisburg, Curatorial Assistant.

Faith Ringgold’s early paintings, which include the American People series (1963–67), capture the racial and gender divisions in 1960s US cities like New York. Working as an artist and teacher in the city, Ringgold spent much of her early adulthood In spaces where she was one of few Black women—a stark contrast to her experiences growing up in the historically black neighborhood of Harlem. The scenes from her early canvases capture the ongoing racial tension and violence pervading these communities, upending the mythologies of integration being propogated at the time.

The graphic style of these early works—with figures rendered in a deliberately simplified way using broad, heavy contours—lent to a more symbolic depiction of race relations in the United States. Ringgold called this style “super realism.” “The idea,” she wrote, “was to make a statement in my art about the civil rights movement and what was happening to Black people in America at that time, and to make it super-real.”

American People Series #3: Neighbors, 1963

Oil on canvas
Courtesy the artist and ACA Galleries, New York

This portrait depicts a white family: a man, a woman, their eldest daughter and younger son. All these people look drab and tired. An eerie blue light casts deep shadows on their faces, and they stand with their arms at their sides in a neutral pose. They look bored. The boy is in the foreground, wearing a white collared shirt with no tie. His chestnut-brown hair is combed cleanly to the side. His father is behind him, wearing a brown shirt with a burgundy tie. His hair is similarly neat. Behind him, on the left, is the mother of the family: she has light blonde hair and deep, sunken eyes. Only her head is visible and it almost looks as though it is floating above the boy. The painting’s shadows make her look significantly older than the rest of the figures: is she the mother or grandmother? On the right of the scene, there is the daughter, wearing a light blue shirt and with coiffured brown hair. Her face is lopsided, her eyes on different levels, and she bears the same uninterested expression as the rest of the family. Together, they form a foreboding unit, staring at the viewer with a feeling that wavers between waiting and intimidation.

American People #5: The Civil Rights Triangle, 1963

Oil on canvas
Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland

Five men stand in a loose triangular composition, with the tallest in the middle and the shortest on the sides of the painting. The men look as though they are posing for a group portrait and are standing very close together. The four men in front look are on the same visual plane, as though they are standing side-by-side, but the fifth man is set back behind them. That fifth man is white with chestnut-brown hair and a light brown suit, wearing a striped red and black tie. The other four men are Black, and are wearing a variety of different outfits. On the left, one man wears a white undershirt. Beside him, a man in profile wears a dark black suit with a red tie. He is facing right, toward the next man, who wears a dark blue suit, and the man next to him on the right of the painting, who is wearing a white collared shirt and a red sweater. Apart from the man in the black suit, who has a slight smile, the people are relatively expressionless. Their faces are cast in dark shadows which strongly contrast the painting’s bright, warmer tones. The shadows are so deep that it looks as though many of the men have moustaches, though it is hard to tell. Behind these figures, there is an abstract shape painted in blue tones: it looks like the top of an oval with another oval inside of it, or the overlapping of a Venn diagram.

The Civil Rights Triangle portrays five men, with the white man at the top. Evoking some activists’ criticism that the larger civil rights movement—with the Black church at its center—was white approved, Ringgold suggests another layer in the power imbalance: the exclusion of women, mirroring her experiences with racism and sexism in the largely white commercial galleries of 1960s New York and among her peers in the male-dominated Black art world. The tension of this inequity between Black men and women is discernible throughout the American People series.

American People Series #8: The In Crowd, 1964

Oil on canvas
Baz Family Collection

A pile of people fills this tall painting, with nine figures sitting on top of each other. Some of their faces are cut off at the edges of the frame, especially those on the bottom and at the right side. They are all squished very close together and their arms reach around each other from the top to the bottom. At the very top, an older white man with white hair is looking at the viewer with expressionless gray eyes. He is reaching around two other white men, with red and blond hair, who also are looking out from the painting. Beneath them, another man in a dark suit is reaching around others, resting his hand on top of someone’s head and covering the mouth of a Black man at the bottom of the painting. These gestures dominate the image: the top of the pile is brighter, with lighter blueish shadows, while the bottom of the pile is has less contrast and darker colors. The visibly white men are at the top, and their arms are simultaneously embracing and pushing down others. Behind them, in the small part of the painting that is not taken up by figures, a blue background is streaked with red downward-pointing arrows.

American People Series #12: The Family Plan, 1964

Oil on canvas
Courtesy the artist and ACA Galleries, New York

Two parents and their daughter fill this canvas, exceeding its boundaries. No member of the family is shown in full. The father is wearing a black suit and a striped red tie, but he is cut off at the edge of the portrait and is only partially visible. The mother is most in view, standing on the right of the painting, and is shown from the waist up wearing a blue top. She has dark orange hair, blue eyes, and pale skin. As with the other members of her family, she is looking directly at the viewer. All three people also have dark rings around their eyes, especially the parents: they do not look as though she has gotten much sleep. Of the daughter, only her head is visible. She looks the happiest of the few. However, dark shadows hang over this family’s faces, making it seem as though these characters are looming toward the viewers with a strong light above them. There is nothing to see behind them except a plain, dense black.

American People Series #16: Woman Looking in a Mirror, 1966

Oil on canvas
Baz Family Collection

A Black woman is sitting in a chair and facing left, holding a large handheld mirror slightly above her head. She is tilting her chin slightly upward in order to get a good look at herself. Her face is visible in the mirror, but her dark brown eyes look away from the viewer. Her fingers curl around its handle gracefully with pointed, red, manicured fingernails. Behind the woman, the back of a red chair is visible, as are large windows further back in the scene. These look out onto verdant green shapes: leaves and plants in semi-abstract forms, rendered by the artist in a style that makes them look like stained glass. The grid of the windows structures the whole scene, with beige beams intersecting with key forms: the woman’s hand and lips on a horizontal line, and her head, the mirror’s edge, and the crook of her elbow on two vertical lines. The leaves in the background are also carefully composed: they curve around the woman’s head, following the thickly painted curls of her hair.

In the next room, the American People series continues on two walls, to the left and right of that room’s entrance. Across the room the Black Light series begins, which is the following section.

To the left of the entrance, a series of paintings are hung in a scattered salon-style hang on the wall. They are at a number of different heights, with some above others. Moving from left to right, and top to bottom, they are:

American People Series #1: Between Friends, 1963

Oil on canvas
Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, New York. Museum purchase with funds from the Roy R. Neuberger Endowment Fund and the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art

Two women stand looking at each other. A Black woman wearing a red dress is on the left, and a white woman in a black and turquoise dress stands on the right. The white woman has bright orange hair and blue eyes. She faces the other woman in profile, with a neutral and possibly stern expression. The Black woman is set slightly farther back in the painting so that her gaze, while directed at the white woman, also looks toward the viewer. Both of the figures are framed by the red beams of an unknown structure, which stands between them and above them, with a deep black surrounding the women.

Between Friends, the first painting in the American People series, represents a friendship between two women—one Black and one white— standing in close proximity yet separated by a cross-like barrier. Their purported friendship was inspired by women Ringgold met while visiting white, supposedly liberal friends in Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard. Confined in the narrow space of the canvas, Ringgold and her friend share a close, if uneasy, intimacy. The claustrophobic composition and the subtle vertical hierarchy of their figures conveys a quiet sense of disharmony and alienation, a consistent theme in this series. Ringgold would continue to explore the social dynamics between Black and white women in later works made during her involvement in the women’s liberation movement.

American People Series #6: Mr. Charlie, 1964

Oil on canvas
Courtesy the artist and ACA Galleries, New York

An older white man fills this portrait, the top of his head disappearing at the top and his shoulders touching the sides of the painting. He holds one hand against his chest with long splayed fingers. He is wearing a dark navy suit with a striped red tie and muted white pocket square. There are deep shadows on his face, as though he is being lit from below, and the painting is awash with shades of turquoise and blue. The man has a neutral expression on his face, with his lips slightly parted to show his teeth, and gazes off into the distance to the left of the viewer. Although the top of his head is not visible, his white hair suggests male pattern baldness. His eyes are the same deep blue as the background behind him: a dense color field that is interrupted by abstract light blue shapes, a red circle, and two downward-pointing arrows.

American People Series #17: The Artist and His Model, 1966

Oil on canvas
Private collection, courtesy Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London

Two figures are standing close to one another, a Black artist and a white woman. The artist is slightly in front of the woman, to the left of the painting, and is wearing a plain white t-shirt. His arm is raised with his arm pointing upward, his hand held at chest height, and a wide paintbrush is loosely held between his index and middle fingers. He has a soft, generous expression. Deep shadows cast a dark royal blue light on his features. The woman behind him, on the right of the painting, is naked and facing away from the viewer. Her long blonde hair reaches down to the middle of her back and she has turned to look at the artist. She has blue eyes and is wearing gold hoop earrings which disappear into her hair. The shadows on her face are not as stark as with the artist, but are cast in the same blue. Behind the two figures, a large window looks out onto an inky cloudless night that is painted in an even darker shade of blue. At the top right, the moon is a full yellow circle.

American People Series #10: Study Now, 1964

Oil on canvas
Courtesy the artist and ACA Galleries, New York

A Black woman with dark brown eyes is looking toward the viewer, and is pictured close-up. Her wavy brown hair fills the top of the painting, and her shoulders sit at the bottom. Her head is slightly tilted as though she is turning in passing. The sense of motion is accented by a large red-brown arrow that is pointing from right to left, starting at the right of the painting and ending just at the woman’s chin. Beneath this arrow, her hand grips a book which has, in large letters, “STUDY” printed on its cover. Her nails are long, manicured, and painted the same reddish brown color as the book and the arrow. To the left, running along the side, there are four large yellow dots behind the woman. They give the impression of a hole punched piece of paper. Barely visible, a long slick black arrow runs beneath these dots, pointing downward. The right of the painting also contains shapes, but abstract ones: a yellow square sits around black and then red concentric circles, and the whole form is balanced on a yellow triangle. The artist has signed her name in the middle of that triangle with dark brown paint: “Ringgold.”

American People Series #14: Portrait of an American Youth, 1964

Oil on canvas
Courtesy the artist and ACA Galleries, New York

A young man sits in the center of this portrait, his hands neatly folded on one leg. He wears a dark suit with a white pocket square and a red and white striped tie. He has a neutral, slightly amused expression on his face, with one eyebrow appearing raised. His face is rendered in even geometric shapes: his measured oval eyes blend into the bridge of his nose, and his features feel in direct proportion to one another. His skin is rendered in a deep magenta paint, with orange used as highlights which increase the feeling of geometry, outlining specific forms on different parts of his face. His hair is combed neatly and has dark brown shadows on its sides. This young man is sitting against an abstract backdrop of different shapes and colors. The space around his head forms the outline of another face, in profile, with a pointy nose and neutral expression. There is also a circle in the space beside him with a deep red center within a deep blue border. The shapes in the background are otherwise largely downward-pointing arrows. The chair—which is a deep magenta, like his face—also splits off into arrows on its sides, pointing away from the young man and toward the painting’s vertical edges.

To the right of the entrance, the remaining paintings from the American People series are hung conventionally in a line, moving from the entrance toward the far end of the room. The final work in this series, U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Advent of Black Power is located on a perpendicular wall that juts out into the room at the end of this space, with the exhibition continuing on the other side.

American People #11: Three Men on a Fence, 1963

Oil on canvas
Private collection

Three men stand around a fence that cuts across the bottom of the painting. In the middle, a white man is sitting on it, his hands placed on the fence for balance. On the right, another white man is behind it, his hand resting on top, and on the left a Black man is standing in profile, facing right, with his right hand on the fence as well. The fence is made of jagged, asymmetrical planks of wood, and has large holes in it, punctuating the border with black or bright red circles. The two white men almost identical: they have combed light brown hair, blue eyes, and deep blue shadows cast on their faces. They are wearing black suits with red striped ties and are looking directly at the viewer. The Black man is also wearing a black suit with a red tie, but is looking toward the men beside him. Behind these people, the background is a field of light blue, with dark blue arrows pointing downward in the spaces between the men. Lines of bright red also stretch from the top of the painting, joining the blue arrows in their downward motion.

American People #9: The American Dream, 1963

Oil on canvas
Private collection

A woman sits for a portrait, and the painting is tightly cropped from her waist to her head. She is cast in a strong light with deep shadows that change her skin tone, making parts of her appear both white and Black. The part of her that is closest to the viewer has a pale skin tone and is cast in blue shadows, while further from the viewer her skin is darker shades of brown. She is wearing a black sleeveless dress and has raised one dark brown hand, flopping it over at the wrist to show off a large expensive ring and long, immaculately red-painted fingernails. Behind her, two red arrows point from the top of the painting downward. One falls behind her head, at the right of the painting, while the other curves over and down to land squarely on top of her hand. It points, at the bottom left of the painting, to a large red circle that is set against a field of turquoise.

American People Series #15: Hide Little Children, 1966

Oil on canvas
Private collection, courtesy Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London

This painting has a long, landscape form, consisting mostly of green foliage set against a dusty blue background. The branches are painted in thick dark lines which cut up the image, making it look like a work of stained glass. Everything about the trees is green, including their trunks, and they are painted densely together. Some leaves are much larger than others, giving an impression of distance, as though the viewer is standing in a forest. Within this scene, five young faces are hidden behind the leaves. Each person is obscured, but their features are clearly visible. There are three white children, two with red hair and piercing blue eyes, and one with blonde hair and dark brown eyes. There are also two Black children. Their irises are not blue, but the rest of their eyes are. Altogether, only these children’s heads are visible: they float in this scene uncannily, staring straight at the viewer with happy, amused expressions.

American People Series #14: God Bless America, 1964

Oil on canvas
Collection of Bonnie and Gilbert Schwartz

The head of a tired-looking white woman floats amid the stars and stripes of the United States flag, tilted vertically to run up and down the painting. Her face is sometimes in front, sometimes behind the stripes, making them look like the bars of a jail. On the left, they are red, but toward the right they turn a dark black that disappears in this painting’s clear, bold outlines. The woman’s face is also cast in two strong colors: mostly red, but with a deep blue that sits in circles around her eyes and streaks the creases on her forehead. She stares directly at the viewer with expressionless blue eyes. At the bottom right of the painting, more of the flag is visible, with the start of a blue rectangle and a single star. The woman’s hand enters from the bottom of the painting to rest on that star, as though it were held to her chest in a pledge of allegiance.

American People Series #19: U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Advent of Black Power, 1967

Oil on canvas
Courtesy the artist and ACA Galleries, New York

This large painting takes up the entire wall with a giant postage stamp. It has blue scalloped edges and features numerous faces that look directly at the viewer. These faces are crammed together in a tight grid, each cropped from the eyebrows to the base of the nose. The people are mostly white or pale-skinned, but a diagonal of darker-skinned faces stretches from the bottom left to the top right of the postage stamp. Intersecting it, on top of various faces, are large letters spelling out “Black power.” Various other text is placed around the postage stamp in red paint: “air mail,” “U.S. postage,” “10 cents,” and the year 1967. When viewed as a whole, the spaces between the rows of faces also spells out letters, with the text set on its side: altogether the stamp is designed on the framework of the words “white power.”

U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Advent of Black Power uses elements of repetition, the grid, and text to assert Ringgold’s optimistic vision of the burgeoning Black Power era. Concealed within the tiled faces—meant to represent the demographic composition of the United States—are the phrases “BLACK POWER” and “WHITE POWER.” Although the diagonal black text reading “BLACK POWER” is easy to locate, the phrase “WHITE POWER” is both harder to detect and much more rooted in the painting’s overall structure—a damning statement on life in the United States and entrenched systems of power and discrimination.

These works are located across from the entrance to the last portion of the American People series, and progress along the wall from left to right, toward the far end of this room.

The Black Light paintings (1967–69) capture Ringgold’s evolving perspective on race relations in the United States, as the integrationist and nonviolent philosophy of the civil rights movement gave way to the more radical ethos of the Black Power and Pan-African movements. Many Black artists at the time were exploring new artistic languages inspired by West African textiles and craft while investing in self-reliance and self-determination and expressing solidarity with African nations newly independent of European colonialist regimes. During this period, Ringgold began experimenting with a revolutionary interpretation of Black Power as an approach to color theory, which she referred to as “black light.” Rendered in black, dark green, blue, red, and gray pigments, these canvases nearly eliminate the use of white paint, becoming a potent symbol of Black autonomy and visibility.

Black Light Series #12: Party Time, 1969
Oil on canvas
Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland

This large rectangular painting is divided into quarters, each of which features a Black person dancing. Each person’s head is set toward the center of the painting, their feet toward each corner, giving a kaleidoscopic or gravity-free effect to the image. A lot of their features extend beyond the frame and are not shown, as though we are glimpsing a fraction of a moment for each person. All four people are wearing bright gold jewelry. On the upper left, a person in a blue jumpsuit looks as though they are falling backward, their head titled upside down. They have a gold belt with a mars symbol attached to it, and are wearing a heavy gold statement ring. Behind them, there is a field of dark blue. Diagonal is another blue scene, with the hues reversed: this time, the background is a lighter blue, and the person’s clothes are a dark blue. They have one visible gold stud earring, and their outfit features a lot of ruffles: ruffles around their waist, ruffles around their cuffs, and ruffles revealed by their outfit’s deep V-neck. All of the ruffles are gold. The people on the other diagonal in this painting are two women. On the lower left, the woman has one leg raised as though in the middle of a dance. Her long gold necklace is flying to the side, as though in motion, and she is wearing a short red dress against a mustard yellow background. On the other side of that diagonal, the colors are again reversed: the other woman also wears a short dress, has heavy gold jewelry, and is in the middle of dancing with her arms raised, but her dress is mustard yellow and the background is a bright, vibrant red.

Black Light Series #7: Ego Painting, 1969
Oil on canvas
The Art Institute of Chicago, Wilson L. Mead Trust Fund; Claire and Gordon Prussian Fund for Contemporary Art; Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize Fund; Ada S. Garrett Prize, Flora Mayer Witkowsky Purchase Prize, Gordon Prussian Memorial, Emilie L. Wild Prize, William H. Bartels Prize, William and Bertha Clusmann Prize, Max V. Kohnstamm Prize, and Pauline Palmer Prize funds, 2019.184

This square canvas is divided into eighths, with triangular sections meeting in the middle like a pinwheel. The entire painting is composed of blue- and black-colored text in different combinations: deep red on light blue, deep blue on red, and light blue on an even deeper blue. In turn, these sections read “Ringgold,” “Black,” and “America.” In the painting’s pinwheel pattern, these words jumble together, sometimes facing the side, sometimes upside-down, and can be read in different conjunctions with one another: “American Ringgold,” “Black Ringgold,” “Black America,” and so on.

Black Light Series #10: Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger, 1969
Oil on canvas
Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland

The US flag is rendered in bright blue and red hues, though a paler blue in place of its customary white stars and stripes. The stars themselves are crammed together, almost touching, as though they are forced into the small rectangle at the flag’s top left. The word “die” is painted in stark capitals using a dark blue, simultaneously blending in and emerging from the stars. The stripes, too, are off: they do not all span the width of the flag painting, but turn at right angles to form horizontally-oriented shapes. From farther away, this looks like abstract lines, but closer one can see the n-word spelled out on its side, ingrained in the design of the flag.

Made in the summer of 1969, just after the world witnessed the iconic image of astronaut Buzz Aldrin saluting the US flag on the surface of the moon, Flag for the Moon is a bitter critique of what and who the flag represents. Here, Ringgold presents racism as a constituent part of society, describing the painting as “my way of saying that too many American people go to bed hungry while the government spent billions to place their flag on the moon… I wanted to show some of the hell that had broken out in the States, and what better place to do that than in the stars and stripes?” A racist, derogatory slur used toward Black people is camouflaged within the flag, presented as a hateful message Ringgold “felt Black people were receiving from their government and too often, still receive.”