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With sadness we announce the passing of Simon Perchik

Simon Perchik, 98, of East Hampton, NY died on June 14 at the VA Hospital in New York City.

Simon was a great man. loving father, grandfather, husband, WW2 pilot, environmental lawyer, social activist and poet. 

A man of principles, Simon was a trailblazer. In his military career he reached the rank of First Lieutenant, flying 35 overseas missions. As an unrelenting environmentalist he served as Assistant DA for Suffolk County as its first Environmental Prosecutor from 1975-1980. In 1980 he retired to write full time as a prolific poet publishing more than 30 books. His archives are in the Beinecke library at Yale University. 

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.

The provocative pioneer known for quilts chronicling scenes of Black history, hope and protest, is the focus of a sweeping show coming to the Glenstone museum in Maryland

In a 70-year career, Ringgold has shown the US its bloody, brutal side. And yet the artist started out wanting to paint landscapes … She talks about growing up during the Harlem Renaissance and her battles with the establishment

She believed that life for her people in America was an act of near-superhuman perseverance, and she was determined to capture that history in every medium she could.

Betye Saar. Faith Ringgold. Mickalene Thomas. Julie Mehretu. Simone Leigh. Jordan Casteel. These are only a few of the Black women artists who have recently exhibited in the nation’s largest museums, like the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim, and the Getty. 

“This is Black art. And it matters. And it’s been going on for two hundred years. Deal with it.” So declares the art historian Maurice Berger toward the beginning of “Black Art: In the Absence of Light,” a rich and absorbing documentary directed by Sam Pollard (“MLK/FBI”) and debuting on HBO Tuesday night. The feature-length film, assembled from interviews with contemporary artists, curators and scholars, was inspired by a single 1976 exhibition, “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” the first large-scale survey of African-American artists. 

“Storytellers: Faith Ringgold + Aminah Robinson” showcases the work of two game-changing African-American artists at Ringling College. Ringgold is a painter, a sculptor, a quilt-maker, and an award-winning children’s author and illustrator. Robinson’s art includes drawings, cloth paintings, books and woodcuts. Curators Tim Jaeger and Mikaela Lamarche reflect Robinson and Ringgold’s multimedia approach by framing their art in a narrative context.

ENGLEWOOD, N.J. — Faith Ringgold has seen plenty of shake-ups and strange moments in her 89 well-traveled years. But the provocative Harlem-born artist — who has confronted race relations in this country from every angle, led protests to diversify museums decades ago, and even went to jail for an exhibition she organized — has had no reference point for the pandemic keeping her in lockdown and creatively paralyzed in her home in this leafy suburb for much of the spring.

A public art competition launched last week that asks New Yorkers to submit designs for the iconic flags that surround the Rink at Rockefeller Center. Led by the site’s developer Tishman Speyer, “The Flag Project” is looking for artwork that celebrates New York City, whether it be through graphic design, a drawing, or collage. Winning designs will be made into flags and flown from Rockefeller Center’s 192 flagpoles this August as part of a temporary exhibit.

The sweeping coronavirus pandemic has closed museums around the world for the near future, but the visual arts can still be enjoyed at least to an extent. One current exhibition, “Riffs and Relations” at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., is turning the spotlight on an expansive group of African-American artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

On Saturday, The Phillips Collection in D.C. will debut Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition, a pioneering exhibition expanding the narrative of modern art in America by exploring the rich and complex history of 20th– and 21st–century African American artists and their responses to European modernism. Organized by guest curator Dr. Adrienne L. Childs and The Phillips Collection, Riffs and Relations will be on view exclusively at The Phillips Collection from February 29–May 24, 2020.

Exhibition: MARCH 26 TO MAY 9, 2020

ACA Galleries is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Richard Mayhew, Transcendence, which celebrates the release of his first monograph (Chronicle Books, 2020) with an essay and interview by Andrew Walker, Executive Director of the Amon Carter Museum.

Elephant and Artsy have come together to present This Artwork Changed My Life, a creative collaboration that shares the stories of life-changing encounters with art. A new piece will be published every two weeks on both Elephant and Artsy. Together, our publications want to celebrate the personal and transformative power of art.

Ringling College exhibit ‘Spectrum’ captures the distant stations of African-American artists

In the months leading up to the election, museums and galleries across America will host a number of impassioned and political exhibitions.

KERRY JAMES MARSHALL ON PABLO PICASSO, FAITH RINGGOLD, HENRI MATISSE, AND ALMA THOMAS AT MOMA

Joseph Peller is featured in Solar Impressions at the Southampton Arts Center from November 16 through December 29, 2019. 

In the early 1970s, the dawn of what became known as hip-hop, he helped shape the art of graffiti on New York City subways. But he hated the word.

The capital’s galleries and museums have been packed to the rafters with outstanding exhibitions this year.

As we traverse Art Basel in Miami Beach, Isaac Julien is mobbed and praised by collectors and fans at every other step. The London-based artist and film-maker is best-known for his poetic and visionary documentaries such as the film installation Lessons of the Hour: Frederick Douglass (2019), which is being shown at Metro Pictures. In the fair’s new Meridians section is the US premiere of Julien’s Lina Bo Bardi—A Marvellous Entanglement (2019), a tribute to the late Brazilian artist and architect. Here, he shares with us his favourite works at the fair.

The Harlem artist will have works from the 1970s and 1990s on view at Art Basel Miami Beach.

With the holidays nearly upon us, it’s time again to start thinking about how you want to celebrate your loved ones. If capitalism is your preferred means for expressing affection, have no fear, Hyperallergic’s editors have banded together to offer our picks for some of this year’s top art-related gifts. From books, to playing cards, and various hand-crafted goods, we’ve got you covered this Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Peruse away below:

What made the 2010s the most thrilling of all the decades I’ve spent in the New York art world was the rising presence of Black artists of every ilk, on every front: in museums, commercial galleries, art magazines, private collections and public commissions.

What made the 2010s the most thrilling of all the decades I’ve spent in the New York art world was the rising presence of black artists of every ilk, on every front: in museums, commercial galleries, art magazines, private collections and public commissions.

Under the leadership of director Christopher Bedford, the Baltimore Museum of Art has made strides towards diversifying its collection. In 2018, the institution sparked a controversy when it deaccessioned works by white male artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Franz Kline, and used proceeds from those sales to purchase pieces by Charles Gaines, Emma Amos, Faith Ringgold, Ana Mendieta, and other artists of color and women artists.

“Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983,” a comprehensive traveling exhibition celebrating African-American art and artists from the stormy, revolutionary, momentous Black Power era, has arrived at the de Young Museum.

Lisa Farrington, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor and Founding Chair Emeritus in the Department of Art & Music, has lived a life surrounded by art—whether creating it, analyzing it, writing about it, or teaching a course, art has been at the center of her life. Over the years, her work has garnered a number of accolades, most recently the Lifetime Achievement award from the Anyone Can Fly Foundation. The award, which honors master artists and scholars of the African diaspora, was especially meaningful because it came from Faith Ringgold, the artist that awoke Farrington’s passion for African-American art. “Growing up I didn’t know much about African-American artists because African-American art wasn’t being taught in most schools at the time. It was during an art class that I took while pursuing my bachelor’s degree at Howard University, a Historically Black College, that I was introduced to Faith Ringgold’s work. We were shown her painting ‘American People Series #20: Die’ and I was completely blown away by her work. That piece now hangs next to Picasso’s ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’ at the Museum of Modern Art.” Years later, while attending the CUNY Graduate Center, Ringgold’s work took center stage in Farrington’s doctoral dissertation, which later became two books, and put her on a path toward educating at John Jay.

The latest edition of the catalog for “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” the blockbuster exhibition that opens Saturday, Nov. 9, at the de Young Museum, features an extraordinary cover image.

A new MOCA exhibition reminds viewers of P&D's quilts, wallpapers, and long-overlooked significance

During the 1990s, while pursuing my graduate art history degree at New York University, I worked in the Education Department of the Museum of Modern Art, where I led gallery tours of the museum’s permanent collection for the general public and occasionally VIPs. At that time, the permanent exhibition galleries, representing art produced from 1880 to the mid-1960s, were arranged to tell the “story” of modern art as conceived by founding director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., beginning with Monet and Cézanne, and then leading into Picasso, Futurism, Surrealism, and Jackson Pollock. According to Barr, “modern art” was a synchronic, linear progression of “isms” in which one (heterosexual, white) male “genius” from Europe or the U.S. influenced another who inevitably trumped or subverted his previous master, thereby producing an avant-garde progression. Barr’s story was so ingrained in the institution that it was never questioned as problematic. The fact that very few women, artists of color, and those not from Europe or North America—in other words, all “Other” artists—were not on display was not up for discussion. Indeed, I was dissuaded by my boss from cheekily offering a tour of “women artists in the collection” at a time when there were only eight on view.

For the last four months, one of the best known art institutions in the country, the Museum of Modern Art has been closed as part of an approximately $450 million renovation.

Whether pairing the two inspires consternation or praise depends largely on how we conceive of the purpose of the Museum itself

It has the world’s finest modern art collection. But now the revered museum is rebalancing its walls – massively boosting work by women and artists of colour

The museum’s unparalleled collection spreads out in an enlarged space with updated stories to tell.

When the Museum of Modern Art reopens on Oct. 21 after a $450-million, 47,000-square-foot expansion, it will finally, if still cautiously, reveal itself to be a living, breathing 21st-century institution, rather than the monument to an obsolete history — white, male, and nationalist — that it has become over the years since its founding in 1929.

Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler, the renovated space includes an additional 165,000 square feet of gallery space, while making the artwork more accessible to the public.

Southern Indiana Center for the Arts in Seymour recently announced its October exhibit, “Mellencamp: Three Generations of Art,” featuring works from John, Marilyn and Speck Mellencamp.

In 1990, Verso Press republished Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman—a now-notorious critique of the 1960s-era Black Power Movement by Michele Wallace, a feminist writer and also the daughter of artist Faith Ringgold—with a new introduction in which the author reflected on lessons learned in the years after her book’s original publication in 1978. “It is my conviction that the only way to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past is to openly discuss them,” Wallace wrote. “Whether in nations, families, or individuals, the practice of being on speaking terms with your past lives is the only thing that makes it possible to trust yourself or anyone else. … The thing that still remained to be worked out was my relationship to my family as a writer and as a woman.”

From one great American institution to another, six works from Glenstone are taking a trip along the Potomac to be displayed at the Reach, the Kennedy Center’s new expansion, which opens to the public this weekend. Starting on September 7th, the works, ranging from aluminum paintings to mixed media on wood, will be on view alongside four other permanent pieces.

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

From Michael Rakowitz’s recreations of bombed artefacts at the Whitechapel Gallery, to Faith Ringgold’s story quilts at the Serpentine Gallery

The iconic American artist Faith Ringgold takes London by storm in a powerful new show at the Serpentine Gallery.

Ringgold is the subject of the Serpentine Galleries' summer exhibition and to coincide with the opening, Matchesfashion.com has also dedicated a room at 5 Carlos Place to celebrate her work.

With its potent depictions of racial violence and African American empowerment now more palatable to the mainstream, the explicit political content in Faith Ringgold’s early work is increasingly de rigueur.

ACA GALLERIES is showing for the first time at The Armory Show and the storied dealer has dedicated its entire booth to Faith Ringgold. There are three paintings from her Black Light Series (1967-69) on display, graphic political prints from the early 1970s, figurative sculptures made in 1978, story quilts including “Change 2” (1988) and “Tar Beach #2” (1990), and paintings on fabric from 2010 called tankas that feature portraits of Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Martin Luther King Jr.

A selection of booths and works from this year's fair that caught AD's eye

In 1926, the historian Carter G. Woodson instituted Negro History Week. The second-ever African American recipient of a Ph.D. from Harvard (after W.E.B. DuBois), Woodson wanted to acknowledge the vibrant cultural achievements of African American individuals that were rippling through the country. At the time, Harlem was brimming with poets such as Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, while Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller were developing Chicago’s jazz scene. In 1976, President Gerald Ford officially transformed Woodson’s initiative into the month-long celebration we honor to this day: Black History Month.

A capsule collection spotlighting Ringgold’s iconic ‘The United States of Attica’ artwork.

An impressive synthesis of influences, along with an obdurate resistance to being told what she can or cannot do, forms the bedrock of Ringgold’s art.

In socioeconomic terms, the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York can be divided into two eras: the first featuring obscurity and poverty, and the second, fortune and fame. But there was very little by way of a transitional bridge between those two periods, which made the arrival of a flood of cash and notoriety in the mid-1950s oddly destabilizing for the artists working in New York. As their colleague, the writer Harold Rosenberg, said, “They lost their minds.…It was the money. Just like schmucks in Hollywood. This hit them much too strong and much too organized.”

More than 300 people gathered at the Brooklyn Museum last night to listen to 87-year-old Faith Ringgold speak about her extraordinary career and activism, which included fighting for major New York City museums to feature work by black artists in the 1960s. Two of her artworks appear in the Brooklyn Museum’s recently opened retrospective, “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which features black artists who explored themes of race, identity, and activism from the years 1963 to 1983.

THE AMERICAN FLAG, its design and all that it symbolizes, is the basis for some of the most politically potent and astute work Faith Ringgold has made over past half century.

With her first UK show at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, the Harlem-born artist reflects on the African American experience

The bar will feature a rotating selection of art in collaboration with ACA Galleries.

It is a great irony that the Faith Ringgold’s first public commission was effectively imprisoned for over 40 years, but this situation raises valuable questions regarding our notions of the public and how that public is served.

Earlier this year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired one of Faith Ringgold’s landmark early paintings, American People Series #20: Die (1967), a potent 12-foot-long scene of a riot that shows black and white men and women running, crying, and falling to the ground, their faces gripped by horror. Two terrified children hold each other amid the mayhem. Blood is everywhere.

In 1967, a year of widespread race riots in America, Faith Ringgold painted a 12-foot-long canvas called American People Series #20: Die. The work shows a tumult of figures, both black and white, wielding weapons and spattered with blood. It was a watershed year for Ringgold, who, after struggling for a decade against the marginalization she faced as a black female artist, unveiled the monumental piece in her first solo exhibition at New York’s Spectrum Gallery. Earlier this year, several months after Ringgold turned 85, the painting was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, cementing her legacy as a pioneering artist and activist whose work remains searingly relevant.

In 1963, Faith Ringgold was 32, the mother of two daughters, and on the hunt for a gallery to show her work. To say that it was difficult for black artists to find gallery representation at that time would be a gross understatement. Nevertheless, as Ringgold tells it in her memoirs, We Flew over the Bridge (1995), she was unrelenting in her search, and one day she had a meeting with Ruth White, who ran a gallery in Manhattan on 57th Street.

Without realizing it, Doug Safranek got pulled into the very long history of the medium of egg tempera when he decided to become a painter. In 1980, Safranek started in the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which remained, at that time, devoted in part to a curriculum of classical techniques.

Legendary artist Faith Ringgold began her career in 1963 — the same year as the March on Washington. She talks to guest host Celeste Headlee about her life, work and why no one originally wanted to hear her story.

Fifty years after the racial upheaval of the 1960s, Americans often like to say they don’t see color. They pretend not to see it even when it’s right in front of their faces, says artist Faith Ringgold. It’s a worldview she finds delusional, counterintuitive and impossible for artists like herself who traffic in color and shades of meaning.

IN July 1963, a month before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington, Romare Bearden met with a group of other black artists in his studio on Canal Street to talk about what they should do for civil rights. "Western society, and particularly that of America, is gravely ill, and a major symptom is the American treatment of the Negro," Bearden said. "The artistic expression of this culture concentrates on themes of 'absurdity' and 'anti-art,' which provide further evidence of its ill-health."