Assaying Ringgold: Feeling the City Vibe While Grappling with My Ambivalence

For a variety of reasons, it’s taken me too long to write this appraisal of a show that I saw 1½ months ago. For one thing, I was knocked sideways by the events in Ukraine. When I finally stumbled back to the keyboard, the international crisis’ impact on the artworld (as well as other breaking cultural news) seemed to me more urgent than an exhibition review.

Also holding me back was my discomfort with my ambivalent reaction to Faith Ringgold: American People (to June 5)—a show that couldn’t manage to greet with unrestrained praise, as I had hoped.

When I arrived at the New Museum on Feb. 15 to view what it billed as “the first full retrospective in New York” of that NYC-born artist’s work, I thought I knew, in advance, what I would write: another adulatory story about a long overdue, revelatory museum survey accorded to an under-appreciated female artist of advanced age—along the lines of my admiration for the Betty Saar show that two years ago opened the Museum of Modern Art’s newly expanded facility, and my appreciation of the Whitney Museum’s 2016 survey focusing on three decades of the seven-decade career of Carmen Herrera (now, sadly, the late Carmen Herrera).

Compared to them, Ringgold is a youngster at a mere 91. But at this late stage of my own long (checkered) career—five decades and counting, I should have known better than to prematurely decide what my take would be on a show I hadn’t yet seen. I came away feeling dissatisfied, thinking that less would have been more. In a show that occupied almost the entire museum, too many of the works, sorry to say, were filler.

As it happened, very few of my professional colleagues were in evidence during the time that I spent at the press preview, which (in an unfortunate departure from what used to be coordinated scheduling) was in competition with a much more glitzy (and far better attended, from the looks of this video) preview at the Metropolitan Museum:

Here are two filmy frocks on display at the Met (about to be attacked by two bears):

And here are Ringgold’s more rugged-looking mannequins:

Not wanting to seem churlish (let alone insensitive), I considered not writing about the New Museum show, so as not to deprecate the works that had emerged from Ringgold’s bold, admirable determination to beat the odds against a black female realist with a serious, subversive political perspective, at a time when the contemporary art scene was dominated by males with a penchant for ascetic abstraction or campy realism.

From my reading of Holland Cotter‘s long NY Times review, he may have had a similar (unstated) reservations about the show. He began by stating:

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.

The paintings on that floor, as Cotter noted, were Ringgold’s early works (and, to my mind, the show’s most compelling). This one is situated in a suburban Westchester oasis where some of my Bronx neighbors used to escape on summer weekends to enjoy some greenery and breathe the country air:

The painting’s insightful wall text (for which I assume credit belongs to the in-house organizers—the indispensable Massimiliano Gioni and/or Gary Carrion-Murayari) explores the scene’s sinister undercurrents:

[The painting] portrays a powerfully direct scene of racial hostility. It recalls a distressing memory from childhood when Ringgold’s Harlem Sunday School took a trip to Tibbetts Brook Park in Yonkers, New York [a place where some members of my own Bronx family used to go to get out to “the country”], where a group of white men with sticks approached the children and demanded they return home. Ringgold emphasizes these feelings of fear and alienation through her moody palette and ghostly application of paint. Rendered with simplified contours and blocks of color, mask-like faces stare out from a compressed setting, uneasily positioning the viewer as a witness to the threatening, all-white crowd.

In his Times review, Cotter went on to state that Ringgold “forge[d] a career path of maximum resistance. To this end, she pursued figure painting, worked with fabric art and focused on narrative content at a time when the mainstream art market wanted little to do with any of these.” But he doesn’t venture his own opinions of those works, nor of the many others that he describes but does not judge. Maybe I’m misreading between his lines, but I suspect I’m not alone in having hoped for a more consistently powerful impact than this exhibition delivered.

Although Ringgold is known and praised for her later story-quilt paintings, those fanciful pieces, over-abundantly displayed (many showing images of famous artists and their works), lacked, for me, the sharp resonance of the earlier works. Here’s one that did arrest me, triggering memories of my own Bronx childhood in a six-story apartment building on a crowded street. It’s a group portrait of building residents, some of whom are hanging out the windows and gawking at the sensational events (fires, accidents, etc.) unfolding below:

Here’s a detail (from the upper left):

Another piece that moved me captured another of my childhood experiences—sweltering summer days in the 1950s, in a building with no air conditioning. In the evenings, we’d escape to the relief and simple pleasures that were close at hand—socializing, playing games and (for the kids) getting to stay up late, while relishing the cool breezes “up on the roof” (as immortalized in the hit song by Carole King and Gerry Goffin).

Here’s Faith’s version of what city dwellers called “Tar Beach”—also the title of a popular children’s book that RInggold authored and illustrated. The book’s protagonist, an eight-year-old girl, floats above her Harlem rooftop, with the George Washington Bridge as backdrop. (Don’t try that at home.)

An earlier work was used as the signature image for the New Museum’s press release, perhaps chosen for its relevance to our current fraught moment:

It requires close looking:

This emotionally charged figurative banner is a foil to Jasper Johns‘ cool, painterly depictions of American flags, which are still fresh in New Yorkers’ minds from the Whitney Museum’s (and Philadelphia Museum’s) massive Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror retrospective (recently closed at both venues).

Instead of “The Flag is Bleeding,” perhaps this one from the Whitney’s show should be titled, “The Flag is Breeding” (baby offsprings?):

The New Museum show was to have given me another look at a star of the Brooklyn Museum’s provocative 2017 show, We Wanted a Revolution. As I had discussed here, “For the Women’s House” was relocated (with Ringgold’s permission) from Rikers Island (where it was intended for the eyes of women prisoners) to the Brooklyn Museum (where its primary audience would be art lovers):

Sadly for me, the prison-to-museum depiction of female role models hadn’t arrived at the New Museum in time for the press preview and was represented by a temporary placeholder:

“Faith Ringgold: American People,” on home turf in New York (although both Faith and I later moved to New Jersey, within a few miles of each other), will travel to the de Young Museum, San Francisco, July 16-Nov. 27. As you may have gathered from what I’ve written, there have been a number of striking convergences in our very different circumstances. Rightly or wrongly, I tended to respond most to the works that struck those personal chords.

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