In ‘Faith Ringgold: American People’ at the MCA, an African American artist’s decades of work get their due Favorite 

Faith Ringgold, the 93-year-old doyenne of African American art, a trailblazing master who foreshadowed the recent rise of art activism and Black figuration, is having her first solo museum show in Chicago.

An electrifying and illuminating retrospective, “Faith Ringgold: American People,” which garnered critical accolades at the New Museum in New York and traveled to the De Young in San Francisco and the Musée Picasso in Paris before arriving in Chicago, will be on view at the MCA through the end of February. The exhibit spans six decades and is perfectly installed in the museum’s fourth-floor galleries, whose walls have been colored with hues lifted from “Windows on the Wedding,” a series of lively geometric hangings Ringgold painted in the mid-1970s. No one should miss it.

Ringgold, who was born in 1930 in Harlem, is no stranger to deferred mainstream success. Her first painting to enter the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, was not acquired until 2016, though it was painted in 1967 and would go on to become a star attraction in the museum’s 2019 rehang. Her first solo show in SoHo, then the center of advanced American art, was not held until 1987. Her 1964 request to join the Spiral Group, the influential Black artist collective, was rebuffed by co-founder Romare Bearden. “Being an artist is tough; being a Black woman artist was hell on fire back then,” Ringgold explains in an interview in the exhibition catalog. “Who was going to battle for us except ourselves?”

So battle Ringgold did, first in paint on stretched canvases, later with textiles in forms ranging from human-size dolls to her famed story quilts, and along the way in the form of picket lines and political posters. The broad arc of her oeuvre is arranged more or less chronologically at the MCA, beginning with the “American People Series.” Ostensibly portraits, these paintings are depictions less of individuals than of power structures and hierarchies determined by race and gender. “Neighbors,” from 1963, features the unfriendliest family of white folks you’d ever want to live next door to, the heavy stylization of their features linking them as much to the history of modern art as to racism generally. “The In Crowd,” from the following year, stuffs nine businessmen into a vertical frame; the white man on top retains his position by embracing and pushing down those below him, a gesture replicated by others, one of whom muffles the brown man in the second-to-last row.

The “American People Series” culminated, in 1967, in three of Ringgold’s boldest compositions ever: six-foot-high murals representing the contemporary racial landscape of the United States. Two of these — “Die” and “The Flag Is Bleeding” — are missing from the MCA version of the show, a downside to the recent surge of interest in Ringgold’s early work. The third, a fictitious “U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Advent of Black Power” is here and a brilliant example of how graphic design can be used to convey critical content. The ginormous stamp features 100 faces in a grid, 10 of them Black; small letters spelling out “BLACK POWER” can be seen clearly, but the ones that read “WHITE POWER” are so huge and structural they can hardly be deciphered.

The exhibition “Faith Ringgold: American People” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
Ringgold’s knack for graphics served her well when she got into activism proper, starting in the late 1960s. Her posters calling for the release of Angela Davis, memorializing the Attica prison uprising, and supporting the Black Panthers reveal some of her many political causes. She was an organizer of “The People’s Flag Show,” a legendary exhibit at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, New York, that led to the arrest of herself and two compatriots for so-called desecration of the flag. She picketed the Whitney and MoMA for failing to show and collect women artists and artists of color; for not hiring enough black curators; and for having board members invested in corporations that supported the Vietnam War. She was often a leader of the groups that organized those protests, including the Art Workers’ Coalition, the United Black Artists’ Committee, the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee, and Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation, which she cofounded with one of her children, Michele Wallace.

In addition to working politically with her then-young daughter, Ringgold also collaborated extensively with her mother, the Harlem fashion designer Willi Posey. Posey sewed the elaborate brocade borders for Ringgold’s tankas, painted scrolls she began making in 1972, inspired by Tibetan religious banners, and initially comprised of impressionistic landscapes and quotes from historic Black feminists like Harriet Tubman. Indicative of Ringgold’s openness to non-white forms of artmaking, they also served the practical purpose of being easy for a lone woman to handle and transport.

The foray into textiles never stopped. Ringgold’s “Family of Woman Mask Series” and other soft sculptures featured painted, beaded and embroidered fabric hoods, plus clothing designed by Posey. These full-size constructions were based on the Dan masks of Liberia and often worn in performances Ringgold would orchestrate. Little seen since, the plentifulness of their presentation at the MCA — an imposing two dozen are on display — would benefit from descriptions of their original activation.

The exhibition “Faith Ringgold: American People” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
The entire second half of “American People” is dedicated to the form for which Ringgold is best known today: her story quilts. These combine the patchwork skills she learned from her mother with her own desire to rewrite and repaint history with Black females at the center. “Tar Beach,” a story quilt from 1988, uses a combination of images and text to tell the tale of 8-year-old Cassie Louise Lightfoot, who flies off the Harlem rooftop where her family is spending a hot summer night, claiming the George Washington Bridge and an ice cream factory and anything else she wants by dint of being free and airborne. The quilt spawned a children’s picture book of the same name, Ringgold’s first of 17, and won both a Caldecott Honor and a Coretta Scott King Award.

If “Tar Beach” is her most beloved story quilt, “The French Collection” series is her most complex and ambitious. It invents the story of Willia Marie Simone, a young African American artist who moves to Paris in the 1920s, dances in the Louvre, poses for Picasso and later has him pose for her, sends her children back to America to be raised by an aunt, becomes an owner of the Café des Artistes, attends Gertrude Stein’s salon, and more. Willia is unsettlingly clear-eyed about both French and American takes on her color and her sex, and Ringgold has no compunctions about raising great Black feminist figures from the dead. There are twelve quilts in total, five of which can be seen at the MCA, all of which make for a transfixing read. (The museum helpfully provides transcripts as well as audio recordings on its website, including in Spanish translation.)

Is Willia an alter-ego for Ringgold? How could she not be, boldly inserting herself and her work into the tradition of Parisian modernism, eyes unclouded to racism and sexism, wit and intelligence intact, talent and drive in full force? “You asked me once why I wanted to become an artist. It is because it’s the only way I know of feeling free,” Willia writes in a letter to her aunt, sounding exactly like Ringgold in interviews. “My art is my freedom to say what I please.”