#blackamericanartist
ALT
ALT“I have always wanted to tell my story, or, more to the point, my side of the story.” – Faith Ringgold.
Faith Ringgold is a painter, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, writer, teacher, and lecturer. Born 1930 in Harlem, New York, Ringgold began her artistic career as a painter in the 1950s.
During the early 1960s Ringgold traveled in Europe. She created her first political paintings, “The American People” Series from 1963 to 1967. This is when Ringgold began to tell “her side of the story” through her art - her lived experience with racial injustice as a black woman in the 1960s. The exhibition “American People, Black Light” showcased these early paintings of the 1960s.
“James Baldwin had just published ‘The Fire Next Time,’ Malcom X was talking about us ‘loving our black selves,’ and Martin Luther King Jr. was leading marches and spreading the word. All over the country and the world people were listening to these black men. I felt called upon to create my own vision of the black experience we were witnessing … I had something to add—the visual depiction of the way we are and look. I wanted my painting to express this moment I knew was history. I wanted to give my woman’s point of view to this period.”
In addition to paintings, Ringgold also created soft sculptures, masks, and story quilts, for which she is best known today.
Image 1: Front cover featuring “Black Light Series #1, Big Black”, 1967, Oil on canvas, 30 1/4”x 42 1/4”
Image 2: “Black Light Series #1: Big Black” and “Black Light Series #2: Man”, 1967, Oil on canvas, 30 1/16” x 24 1/8”
American people, Black light : Faith Ringgold’s paintings of the 1960s
Essay by Michele Wallace, edited by Thom Collins and Tracy Fitzpatrick.
Author / Creator: Ringgold, Faith
Purchase, N.Y. : Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, c2010.
136 p. : ill. (chiefly col.) ; 28 cm.
English
HOLLIS number: 990127471960203941
