Ten adults--men and women, black and white--fight, flee or die over the twelve-foot span of American People Series #20: Die, as an interracial pair of children cowers unnoticed in their midst. While Faith Ringgold (born 1930) was devising this bloody spectacle in a Manhattan studio in the summer of 1967, civil unrest was convulsing black neighborhoods across the US. Art historian Anne Monahan's essay explores the mural's carefully orchestrated chaos and its multiform inspirations, from contemporary anxiety about black revolution, through the writings of James Baldwin and LeRoi Jones, to iconic canvases by Picasso and Pollock then on view at MoMA.
CORETTA SCOTT KING AWARD WINNER • CALDECOTT HONOR BOOK • A NEW YORK TIMES BEST ILLUSTRATED BOOK Acclaimed artist Faith Ringgold seamless weaves fiction, autobiography, and African American history into a magical story that resonates with the universal wish for freedom, and will be cherished for generations. Cassie Louise Lightfoot has a dream: to be free to go wherever she wants for the rest of her life. One night, up on “tar beach,” the rooftop of her family’s Harlem apartment building, her dreams come true. The stars lift her up, and she flies over the city, claiming the buildings and the city as her own. As Cassie learns, anyone can fly. “All you need is somewhere to go you can’t get to any other way. The next thing you know, you’re flying among the stars.”
This is an important new book published to coincide with a major exhibition of Faith Tinggold's new work and Studio collection. While the book explores Faith's work in her studio and her personal artistic journey, it is also an encounter between one artist and another, between Faith and her collaborator Curlee Holton. The mix provides unique insights into the struggles and triumphs of a woman who is at once an activist and an artist and whose achievements are admired throughout the world.
Faith Ringgold (born 1930) is famed today as the progenitor of the African-American story-quilt revival of the late 1970s, but her story begins much earlier, with her American People Series of 1963. These once influential paintings, and the many political posters and murals she created throughout the 1960s, have largely disappeared from view, being routinely omitted from art historical discourse over the past 40 years. American People, Black Light is the first examination of Ringgold's earliest radical and pioneering explorations of race, gender and class. Undertaken to address the social upheavals of the 1960s, these are the works through which Ringgold found her political voice. American People, Black Light offers not only clear insight into a critical moment in American history, but also a clear account of what it meant to be an African American woman making her way as an artist at that time.
Acclaimed artist and Caldecott-winning picture book creator Faith Ringgold shares an inspiring look at America's lineage in this stunning ode to our country--past, present, and future. America is a land of diversity. Whether driven by dreams and hope, or escaping poverty or persecution, our ancestors--and the faces of America today--represent people from every reach of the globe. And each person brought with them a unique gift--of art and music; of determination and grit; of ideas and strength--that forever shaped the country we all call home. Vividly evoked in Faith Ringgold's sumptuous colors and patterns, WE CAME TO AMERICA is an ode to every American who came before us, and a tribute to the children who will carry its message into our future.
One of the country's preeminent African-American artists and an award-winning children's book author shares the fascinating story of her life as she looks back on her struggles, growth, and triumphs in this gorgeously illustrated work. (Memoir)
The story of Faith Ringgold--activist, author, academician--is an uplifting look at a progressive artist who overcame discrimination and triumphed as a giant figure in American art, notable as an accomplished painter, a sculptor, a printmaker, and an art quilter. She has never abandoned her goal of searching for human dignity and empowerment for fellow African Americans while tirelessly fighting against discrimination. Faith Ringgold is a captivating look at the personal and professional life of one of the country's most notable female artists. Selected works from several of her famous series are presented, including The Flag Is Bleeding, Help: the Slave Rape Series #11, The Purple Dolt Series, Mother's Quilt, and We Came to America. Lisa E. Farrington is a faculty member at Parsons School of Design in New York City, where she teaches art and race and gender issues. A former Mellon Foundation fellow and recipient of numerous academic awards and honors, she is the author of Creaing Their Own Image; African-American Women Artists (Oxford University Press, 2004) and Art on Fire; The Politics of Race and Sex in the Paintings of Faith Ringgold (Millennium, 1999).
In 1948 Andrew Wyeth produced what would become one of the most iconic paintings in American art: a desolate landscape featuring a woman lying in a field, that he called "Christina's World." The woman in the painting, Christina Olson, lived in Cushing, Maine, where Wyeth and his wife kept a summer house. She suffered from polio, and was paralyzed from the waist down; Wyeth was moved to portray her when he saw her one day crawling through the field towards her house. "Christina's World" was to become one of the most well-loved and most scorned works of the twentieth century, igniting heated arguments about parochialism, sentimentality, kitsch and elitism that have continued to dog the art world and Wyeth's own reputation, even after the artist's death in 2009. An essay by MoMA curator Laura Hoptman revisits the genesis of the painting, discussing Wyeth's curious focus, over the course of his career, on a deliberately delimited range of subjects and exploring the mystery that continues to surround the enigmatic painting.
Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic Sebastian Smee tells the fascinating story of four pairs of artists—Manet and Degas, Picasso and Matisse, Pollock and de Kooning, Freud and Bacon—whose fraught, competitive friendships spurred them to new creative heights. Rivalry is at the heart of some of the most famous and fruitful relationships in history. The Art of Rivalry follows eight celebrated artists, each linked to a counterpart by friendship, admiration, envy, and ambition. All eight are household names today. But to achieve what they did, each needed the influence of a contemporary—one who was equally ambitious but possessed sharply contrasting strengths and weaknesses. Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas were close associates whose personal bond frayed after Degas painted a portrait of Manet and his wife. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso swapped paintings, ideas, and influences as they jostled for the support of collectors like Leo and Gertrude Stein and vied for the leadership of a new avant-garde. Jackson Pollock’s uninhibited style of “action painting” triggered a breakthrough in the work of his older rival, Willem de Kooning. After Pollock’s sudden death in a car crash, de Kooning assumed Pollock's mantle and became romantically involved with his late friend’s mistress. Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon met in the early 1950s, when Bacon was being hailed as Britain’s most exciting new painter and Freud was working in relative obscurity. Their intense but asymmetrical friendship came to a head when Freud painted a portrait of Bacon, which was later stolen. Each of these relationships culminated in an early flashpoint, a rupture in a budding intimacy that was both a betrayal and a trigger for great innovation. Writing with the same exuberant wit and psychological insight that earned him a Pulitzer Prize for art criticism, Sebastian Smee explores here the way that coming into one’s own as an artist—finding one’s voice—almost always involves willfully breaking away from some intimate’s expectations of who you are or ought to be. Praise for The Art of Rivalry “Gripping . . . Mr. Smee’s skills as a critic are evident throughout. He is persuasive and vivid. . . . You leave this book both nourished and hungry for more about the art, its creators and patrons, and the relationships that seed the ground for moments spent at the canvas.”—The New York Times “With novella-like detail and incisiveness [Sebastian Smee] opens up the worlds of four pairs of renowned artists. . . . Each of his portraits is a biographical gem. . . . The Art of Rivalry is a pure, informative delight, written with canny authority.”—The Boston Globe
