Faith Ringgold

WORKS BY MORE THAN 60 ARTISTS, including Faith Ringgold, are featured in “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.” Nearly all the artists are black, except Virginia Jaramillo, Andy Warhol (1928-1987), and Alice Neel (1900-1984), who contributed a portrait of Ringgold to the landmark exhibition.

FOR ITS FIFTH ANNUAL GALA in New York, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is paying tribute to 42 artists, an “intergenerational vanguard” including Jordan Casteel, Faith Ringgold, Amy Sherald, Deborah Roberts, and David Hartt.

At London’s Serpentine Gallery, Faith Ringgold tells stories of race and self-discovery which have too often gone untold.

At London’s Serpentine Gallery, Faith Ringgold tells stories of race and self-discovery which have too often gone untold.

SERPENTINE GALLERIES is presenting a five-decade survey of pioneering American artist Faith Ringgold, 88. Throughout her career, Ringgold has worked at the intersection of art and politics. Exploring many bodies of work dating from 1963 to 2010, the show spans the civil rights and Black Power eras and continues a decade into the 21st century.

MORE THAN A DOZEN EXHIBITIONS, most in and around London, are showcasing the work of black female artists this summer. Presented at museums, nonprofits, and commercial galleries, many of the shows are breaking new ground for the artists, who span generations. Faith Ringgold at Serpentine Galleries is making her European institutional solo debut and Deborah Roberts at Stephen Friedman Gallery is presenting her first-ever European solo exhibition.

“There is power in ageing,” Faith Ringgold declares. We are talking about her forthcoming project, Ageing-aling-aling, but, coming after a wealth of stories, narrated in the slinky Chucs café next to her first European retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery, the statement feels a little redundant. At 88, and as engaged as ever, the multidisciplinary artist has witnessed numerous landmark social shifts - and all the more extraordinarily, been at the centre of many.

As a new exhibition of art by Faith Ringgold opens in London, the 88-year-old talks to Arwa Haider about her early life and how she created subversive works with postage stamps and story quilts.

These shows are surveys of long lives — the combined age of Hurtado and Ringgold is 186. Neither has had a UK solo show before.

During the 1960s and ’70s, Faith Ringgold was at the center of a community of black female artists dealing in their work with issues related to race, gender, and their intersections. While her “story quilts”—woven pieces that reveal aspects of her autobiography—are well-known, her paintings and sculptural works have only recently received mainstream recognition. With a retrospective of the artist’s work now on view at the Serpentine Gallery in London, we went through our archives and pulled out excerpts from interviews with Ringgold and reviews of her work, including musings on her first-ever solo exhibition, at Spectrum Gallery in New York. American People Series #20: Die (1967), the 12-foot-long painting mentioned in that review, was recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York—a sign of Ringgold’s rising star. —Alex Greenberger