The only amazing thing is that Faith Ringgold is only now getting a comprehensive retrospective at the New Museum in New York.
The now ninety-two-year-old African American has been dealing with systemic racism in the USA and Europe since the 1960s, with a decidedly feminist perspective in an impressive number of media.
Ringgold is a visual artist as well as a writer and activist.
Most recently, her work caused a stir when, in 2019, "American People Series # 20" was installed at MoMA right next to Pablo Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon".
The retrospective in the New Museum impressively illustrates the extent to which Ringgold's work aims to revise the canon of modernity that has just been established by MoMA.
"Flight" to France
Ringgold grew up in Harlem in the 1930s, the daughter of a fashion designer.
After training as an art teacher, she went on an educational trip to France in 1961, where she also lived in the 1970s.
This "escape" certainly had to do with her disillusioned experiences as an anti-Vietnam War activist, women's rights activist and civil rights activist.
But it was precisely in this context that some of her most impressive pictures in the American People Series were created.
Formally and in terms of content, she referred to Pop Art, which was dominating the art market at the time and was a genuinely American art movement.
But while Pop Art's celebration of capitalism and commodity fetishism is based on the illusion of a homogeneous consumer society,
Artistic charge was risky
This also applies to a limited extent to “Die”, which is now hanging in the MoMA and which, in terms of the brutality of the depiction and the frieze-like arrangement of the figures against a gray background, is reminiscent of Picasso’s “Guernica”.
At the same time, the chessboard background of gray panels and the repetition of the same figures - especially the blond Andy Warhol double - create a reference to Pop Art.
Even the title "Die" seems to refer to Warhol's breakthrough work 129 Die in Jet, which shows a newspaper page depicting a plane crash.
Except that in the case of Ringgold, the misfortune is man-made and one of the Warhol doubles storms into the picture with a drawn pistol together with an African-American man who is also armed.
Like all the other figures, they are wounded and stare at the viewer with wide, panicked eyes.
This ambivalence also characterizes "# 18: The Flag is Bleeding", a critical interpretation of Jasper John's Stars and Stripes flag pictures.
Because at Ringgold, blood is dripping from the red banner stripes, which seem to keep people trapped behind a fence.
Again the black man grabs a knife and bleeds from the heart at the same time.
A blonde woman arms him and a white man.
But whether their attempts at mediation will be successful remains questionable in view of the black man's mortal wound.
In addition, he could have inflicted the injuries himself with the knife and refer Ringgold to the black part in their misery.
Ringgold's capture, because she helped organize the People's Flag Show in 1970, shows how politically explosive and also risky such a portrayal was at the time.