Psychological snapshots of African American experience as the Civil Rights Movement’s integrationist ethos was giving way to the nationalist one of Black power, they were antithetical in form and content to the cool, ostensibly apolitical modernism then hegemonic at MoMA and well beyond it.ĭie advertises Ringgold’s ambition in both its size and its nods to iconic world-makers.

The group, which was heavy on New York School abstraction, voted her in on the strength of her American People series, easel paintings of interracial contact that she had been making since 1963. Ringgold had joined Spectrum the previous year as its only black member.

To telegraph the message and counterbalance the chaotic subject, she deployed a structured composition, restricted palette, and graphic style. The adults fight, flee, or die as two overlooked children cower near the center, instantiating a moral about generational responsibility that presumably aligns with Ringgold’s priorities as a mother and schoolteacher. While the figures are standardized racial types, their matching costumes imply that some fundamental transracial commonality has ruptured for reasons unknown. Its gridded but otherwise featureless landscape evokes formalist painting, urban concrete, and pawns on a chessboard.

Its capstone, American People Series #20: Die (hereafter Die, as it was known at the time), was her last, largest, and most ambitious painting of that summer.ĭie conjures a blood-spattered world of indiscriminate interracial carnage. The show would be her first outside Harlem, where she was born, lived, and taught art at P.S. 1 Faith Ringgold left the same exhibition Kramer was reviewing with a markedly different impression: “I came away with the idea that there was more to a big canvas than its size that there had to be a good reason for taking up so much space if the painting was to be more than merely expensive wallpaper.” 2Īt that moment Ringgold was immersed in her own large-scale painting project for an exhibition that December at Spectrum, a cooperative gallery a few blocks from MoMA. No longer content to be a discrete object, painting aspires to become a world.” So the critic Hilton Kramer, writing in the New York Times in July 1967, described how oversize paintings fill our field of vision. “The world closes in on us, and yet painting.becomes more expansive. But it has to tell a story that is profound.” “I create work that pleases me, that thrills me, that speaks to me.

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