The fact that Faith Ringgold’s name is not known is one of those historical nonsenses that the current revision of the canon tries to correct with forced marches. At almost 93 years old, the American painter, who has created a body of work in which art and activism are inseparable, is experiencing a recognition she perhaps could never have imagined. As a great-granddaughter of slaves, she struggled for recognition of her collective through representation through art several decades before the mingling of politics and painting. Heir to the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance, a neighborhood where she grew up surrounded by poets and musicians, Ringgold wanted to re-examine art history in order to change its official history. She defended the role of black women in the transition to modernism when that too was utterly exotic, and signed works in which she mixed her biography with the rewriting of art history, in the key of autofiction with which she seems to influence the work of prominent black people Today’s artists like Mickalene Thomas or Njideka Akunyili Crosby.
In view of the importance that identity politics has attained, it is surprising that no Anglo-Saxon museum has so far dedicated the deserved retrospective to it. His inclusion in a themed exhibition on black art at the Tate Modern in 2017 opened a cycle of recognition that culminated last year with a major monograph at the New Museum in New York, which opened this week in a reduced version – some fifty works that do not do justice to the richness of his production – in the Picasso Museum in Paris. Despite everything, the show is exciting. First, because it reflects a path that began in times of black power and hatched late with the advent of Black Lives Matter, drawing a kind of visual history of African-American activism, always linked to very precise aesthetic codes.
The dialogue between Picasso and Ringgold was initiated by MoMA in 2019 when it juxtaposed a work by the painter The Young Ladies of Avignon in its permanent collection.
And secondly, for the success of inviting her to the museum of the Malaga artist, with whom Ringgold maintained a tense and fruitful dialogue throughout his career. “If I had to name the artist who inspired me the most, I would name Picasso,” the artist once said, accepting him as an influence and counter-model, as a commander, but also as an archenemy. It’s a brilliant programming gesture promoted by the Paris museum’s new director, Cécile Debray, who aspires to end the narrow institutional discourses on Picasso with respect and iconoclasm. The pattern perfectly symbolizes the social debates that arise today around his figure.
This dialogue was initiated by MoMA with the rearrangement of its permanent collection in 2019, when it hung one of Ringgold’s paintings alongside Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, in the seemingly most daring pairing of this new route that equated the original with its metapictorial re-read. Located in Paris, the work in question is by far the most compelling of the exhibition: Die, a Guernica-inspired pop-style mural intended as an allegory for the race war that shook his country during the long, hot summer of 1967 it was part of the series American People, launched a few years earlier, a frontal attack on perceived American progress that provided an account of the commonplace racism that persisted after the repeal of racial segregation laws.
‘Picasso’s Studio: The French Collection Part I’ (1991) by Faith Ringgold in which she reinterprets ‘The Young Ladies of Avignon’ with a black model at the centre. Faith Ringgold / ARS; NY&DACS; London / ACA Galleries; NYC 2022
Ringgold’s political struggle was also reflected in his technique and formal thinking. In the Black Light series, he eliminated white from his palette and blended the remaining tones with black to paint opaque portraits of nearly invisible characters, in a successful metaphor for their social condition. At the same time, he signed posters demanding the freedom of Angela Davis and collages defending the Black Panthers. His post-impressionist landscapes of the 1950s were already a distant memory, which he put aside when he read James Baldwin and understood that the only possible way was to radicalize his art.
After his first solo exhibition in New York in 1970, he searched for new horizons. Primarily through paintings on canvas inspired by Nepalese art, in which he used materials reminiscent of Africa, such as linen or raffia. And then quilting, an indigenous quilting technique he used to tell myths and legends about African American lives. In a 1972 painting, Slave Rape, she imagined herself as a raped slave, in an unusual exercise in historical backward projection into the lives of her ancestors.
In his reinterpretation of Lunch on the Grass, he gave Picasso the role that Manet had reserved for the naked prostitute
Already in the 90’s he started work on The French Collection, a prankster story in 12 textile works with a young (fictional) African American painter in 1920’s Europe, where he worked with Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso of course. In one of them he reinterpreted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, assuming that nothing had been invented that African artists did not know (and placed a black model at the center, implicitly criticizing their invisibility in avant-garde times). And then he proposed his version of Lunch on the Grass with his friends and family. Picasso reappeared, only in the role Manet had reserved for the naked prostitute, in a role reversal filled with humor and wicked hostility. It was the most powerful of Ringgold’s blows, which often had the cunning to appear as mere caresses.
‘Believe Ringgold’. Picasso Museum. Paris. Until July 2nd.
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