Faith Ringgold

NEW YORK (AP) — Author-visual artist Faith Ringgold, poetry critic Helen Hennessy Vendler and photographer Susan Unterberg will be honored this spring at the American Academy of Arts and Letters′ annual awards and induction ceremony.

Faith Ringgold Was Wilson’s Artist In Residence In 1976

Through paintings, traditional masks, and quilts, artist Faith Ringgold explored the Civil Rights Movement and the fight for women’s rights through her art and incorporated the rich history of African culture into her work.

This year, after a series of delays, many of the most anticipated exhibitions of the past few years, coincided, resulting in a bounty of art to see. Prime among them were recurring shows, like the Venice Biennale in Italy and Documenta 15 in Kassel, Germany, which lured hundreds of thousands of visitors with the promise of cutting-edge art.

But, alongside those art festivals, which tended to hog the spotlight, a number of surveys and retrospectives continued to push at the limits of the canon and introduce new figures, all the while complicating the study of artists who are well-known. Many of these shows are still traveling and will continue to reshape art history as they venture to new venues.

Below, a look at the 25 exhibitions that defined 2022.

Working across many visual vocabularies, the eight artists featured here collectively represent the phenomenal trajectory of the last half century. They have received widespread recognition for practices that have magnificently engaged media, pioneered new forms, and expressed radical subjectivities around history, gender, race, and identity - while expanding representations of women in the world of art and beyond.

THE TIME 100 LIST of the most influential people of 2022 was announced today and Faith Ringgold, 91, was among the many impressive figures honored. The newsmagazine enlisted Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem to pay tribute to Ringgold.

In the artist Faith Ringgold’s children’s book “Harlem Renaissance Party,” Lonnie, a young boy, and his Uncle Bates spend a whirlwind day in nineteen-twenties Harlem meeting Black artistic greats, including Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong, and Coleman Hawkins. At the end of the tour, Lonnie says to his uncle, “Black people didn’t come to America to be free. We fought for our freedom by creating art, music, literature, and dance.” His uncle responds, “Now everywhere you look you find a piece of our freedom.” This understanding of the inescapable entanglement of joy and sorrow—and of hardship and creation—is one that echoes through much of Ringgold’s work, which can be seen, in a major retrospective, “Faith Ringgold: American People,” at the New Museum, in New York City, through June.

This week’s cover, for the Spring Style & Design Issue, features a piece from Ringgold’s “Jazz Stories” series, which she began in 2004. In it, Ringgold, who was born in Harlem in 1930, celebrates the music that has provided her with a lifetime of inspiration.

If you want to catch the heat of the lava flow that was United States racial politics in the 1960s, the second floor of the New Museum in Manhattan is a good place to go. There you’ll find the earliest work in “Faith Ringgold: American People,” the first local retrospective of the Harlem-born artist in almost 40 years.

Now 91, Ringgold was already a committed painter when the Black Power movement erupted. And she had a personal investment in the questions it raised: not just how to survive as a Black person in a racist white world, but how, as a woman, to thrive in any world at all.

“This may well be the most important purchase of a single work of contemporary art since the National Gallery acquired Jackson Pollock’s No. 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) in 1976,” said Harry Cooper, senior curator and head of the department of modern and contemporary art.

The National Gallery of Art has acquired The American People Series #18: The Flag is Bleeding (1967), its first painting by Faith Ringgold (b. 1930). This pivotal work by a leading figure of contemporary art exemplifies the artist’s skill in using art as a vehicle to question the social dynamics of race, gender, and power. As a visual storyteller, Ringgold is known for her thought-provoking depictions of the difficult realities of the American experience. 

Watch Faith Ringgold on CBS Sunday Morning

Sunday Morning Extra Nancy Giles talks with artist Faith Ringgold, who for decades refused to bow to convention during her career as she stitched a vibrant tapestry of art, history and social commentary

“Mhm, that’s right,” Faith Ringgold says, reading the text at the bottom of her 1972 work United States of Attica: “This map of American violence is incomplete. Please write in whatever you find lacking.” We’re discussing one violent event in particular—the race riots that rocked Tulsa, Oklahoma 100 years ago—when it hits me: The massacre almost took place during Ringgold’s lifetime. The artist is now 90, and about as spry as a nonagenarian can be.