Phaidon releases companion book for Faith Ringgold retrospective
On February 23, Phaidon releases ‘Faith Ringgold: American People,’ a companion book to the Ringgold retrospective opening at the New Museum in New York.
NEW YORK – Phaidon, in partnership with the New Museum, is pleased to present the companion volume to New York’s most complete retrospective of the art of Faith Ringgold (American, b. 1930-). Faith Ringgold: American People will be the most significant collection of scholarship on Ringgold’s work to date, bringing together more than 60 years of work. It was released in hardback on February 23, priced at $79.95.
Spanning painting, sculpture, posters and her signature painted story quilts, the 150 full-color plates come from all periods of her career, allowing the reader to track the development of her style as it evolved and expanded to meet the urgency of the political and social changes taking place in America during her lifetime.
The book includes contributions by curators, writers, and artists across generations, including essays by Amiri Baraka, LeRonn P. Brooks, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Bridget R. Cooks, Mark Godfrey, Lucy R. Lippard, Michele Wallace and Zoe Whitley, along with an interview with Ringgold and reflections on her life and legacy by American artists Diedrick Brackens, Jordan Casteel, and Tschabalala Self. This fully illustrated publication will focus on all aspects of Ringgold’s career, and the range of contributors speaks to the variety of audiences her work has reached during the past 60 years. Long overdue, this survey will provide a timely opportunity to appreciate a critical voice in the history of American art.
Image from the interior pages of ‘Faith Ringgold: American People,’ which Phaidon will release on February 23.
Artist, author, educator, and organizer Faith Ringgold links the multidisciplinary achievements of the Harlem Renaissance to the political art of young Black artists working today. During the 1960s, Ringgold created some of the most indelible art of the civil rights era, melding her own unique style of figurative painting with a bold, transformative approach to the language of protest. In subsequent decades, she captured the racial and gender divisions in 1960s American society with searing insight. Her large-scale “murals” — including the celebrated American People Series #20: Die (1967), recently juxtaposed with Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon at the Museum of Modern Art — will be shown alongside her iconic political posters advocating support for the Black Panther Party and freeing activist Angela Davis, among other collective causes.
The book and retrospective also examine Ringgold’s embrace of non-Western and craft traditions — including her performance objects and “soft sculptures” — which demonstrate her attempts to transcend the predominately white art historical tradition to find more suitable forms for her radical exploration of gender and racial identity. Although lesser known within Ringgold’s oeuvre, these works led directly to the creation of her best-known, story quilt paintings of the 1980s and 1990s.
Among the most influential artworks of the past 50 years, Ringgold’s story quilts draw on both personal autobiography and collective histories. The story quilts point to larger social conditions and cultural transformations, from the Harlem Renaissance to the realities of Ringgold’s life as a working mother, artist and activist. This book and retrospective include a wide range of Ringgold’s quilts, including formative pieces created with her mother; important early series such as The Bitter Nest and Change; and the largest selection to date of her historic series, The French Collection and The American Collection. Together, these story quilts position the artist’s own personal and professional biography in dialog with key moments in art history and the larger narrative of the African American experience across the 20th century.
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Courtesy of Phaidon Press
Courtesy of Phaidon Press
