The Musée national Picasso-Paris hosts the first exhibition in France to bring together a group of major works by Faith Ringgold. She is an emblematic figure of a committed and feminist American art, from the struggles for civil rights to those of Black Lives Matter, and the author of very famous works of children’s literature. Her work links the rich heritage of the Harlem Renaissance to the current art of young black American artists. Through her rereadings of modern art history, she leads a true plastic and critical dialogue with the Parisian art scene of the early 20th century, notably with Picasso and his Demoiselles d’Avignon.
Early Works #25: Self-Portrait 1965 Huile sur toile 127 x 101,6 cm Brooklyn Museum; Gift of Elizabeth A. Sackler, 2013.96. © Faith Ringgold / ARS, NY and DACS, London, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 2022
Born in New York City in 1930, Faith Ringgold grew up in Harlem, the northern part of Manhattan that became the symbolic capital of the cultural awakening of black communities between the wars. She spent her childhood in a thriving community of creators, musicians, writers and thinkers. She continued to live and work there as an artist and public school teacher for decades. It is where her artistic, cultural and family commitments were formed. The artist’s entire career is a testament to her quest for and creation of singular forms of radical exploration of sexual and racial identity. This exhibition is the first to bring together, in France, a group of major works by Faith Ringgold. It extends the retrospective devoted to her by the New Museum in early 2022 and is organized in collaboration with this New York institution.
Mingling modernity with vernacular traditions, texts and images, she develops a highly original art based on performance and textiles. Her radical, popular work, notably highlighted in the re-hang of the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2018, is inspirational for many artists today. In her series American People, Faith Ringgold provided a caustic commentary on the American way of life in the aftermath of segregation, through highly stylised fgurative compositions in a “Super Realistic” style.
“I didn’t want people to be able to look, and look away, because a lot of people do that with art. I want them to look and see. I want to grab their eyes and hold them, because this is America.” – Faith Ringgold
Picasso’s Studio: The French Collection Part I, #7 1991 Acrylique sur toile, tissus imprimé et teint, encre 185,4 x 172,7 cm Worcester Art Museum; Charlotte E. W. Bufngton Fund. © Faith Ringgold / ARS, NY and DACS, London, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 2022
THE FRENCH COLLECTION. STORY QUILTS
“My art is my voice” Faith Ringgold tells stories through her painted quilts, which combine a central painted picture with a border of dense text. The biographical content of her work becomes more prominent, and she narrates her journey in the form of refections and uplifting imaginary stories. In the ambitious French Collection series she portrays a young African-American artist seeking her path in 1920s Paris. This group is particularly important for its reinterpretation of modern art in the light of the Harlem Renaissance and the artistic sources Ringgold appropriated and integrated into her work, mainly Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, but also Gertrude Stein. In 12 paintings made between 1991 and 1997, based on her memories of a trip to Paris in 1961 and a residence in La Napoule in the South of France, she unfolded inventive imaginary situations featuring real historical fgures, places in the French scene and historical and contemporary African-American personalities. Here, mixing periods and generations, she exhorted women to take their rightful place, immersing the viewer in the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance, which questioned African objects’ link with modernity and established a specifc African-American modernism.
Exhibition until 2 July at Musée Picasso, 5 rue de Thorigny75003 Paris
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