Faith Ringgold: ‘I Didn’t Want People to Be Able to Look, and Look Away’

In 1970, Religion Ringgold made her first huge sale. Chase Manhattan Financial institution nearly purchased “Flag for the Moon,” a portray that reminded them of a Jasper Johns — till they realized these stars and stripes had been letters spelling a violent racial slur.

So as an alternative they picked “The American Spectrum” (1969), a row of summary faces painted in a gradient of pores and skin tones from darkish to mild. As Ringgold, her daughter Michele Wallace and Kirsten Weiss write in FAITH RINGGOLD: POLITICS / POWER (Weiss Publications, $49.95), the piece was initially referred to as “Six Shades of Black,” however the brand new title “was deemed extra amenable to collectors and fewer more likely to encourage inconvenient questions on ethnic and racial representations.” The financial institution paid $3,000 for it, and nonetheless has it right this moment.

However a reputation is simply that, and as this guide reveals, all of Ringgold’s work within the ’60s and ’70s pushes the viewer towards simply such questions: in regards to the whiteness of girls’s liberation, in regards to the exclusion of Black artists from the institution, about felony justice. The oil work, collages, photographs and textiles herein hint 25 years of U.S. historical past by the eyes of a key determine within the Black Energy and Black feminist actions. “I didn’t need folks to have the ability to look, and look away,” she says. “I need to seize their eyes and maintain them, as a result of that is America.”

Lauren Christensen is an editor on the Guide Evaluation.