Every piece in “Faith Ringgold” at the Jack Shainman Gallery is instantly recognizable as hers. Ringgold died in 2024, and the show, the gallery’s first with her estate, is a kind of mini-retrospective that also demonstrates her extraordinary range, both formally and in subject matter. There are oil paintings, gouaches, figurines and unstretched textile works inspired by Tibetan thangkas; there are “story quilts,” like an exuberant 2004 example that shows a woman dancing and singing in front of a jazz trio; and there are several iterations of what the celebrated artist called her “Slave Rape” series.
But you could put nearly any one of these pieces alone in a room — the bright little gouache that says, in cursive, “You don’t know me but we all know you,” the eerie 1960s painting of a coven of ominous white men — and still feel the force of Ringgold’s vision.
Part of it, of course, is simply about how they look. Ringgold stuck to a distinctive palette of saturated colors, especially reds, and her stylized, deceptively simple drawings and designs sit so delicately between Op Art and textile pattern, between Pop Art and Expressionism, between caricature and archetype, that they hold true in any medium. But there’s also a philosophical consistency, an insistence on embracing the full scope of the Black American experience matched by an unwavering conviction in the transformative, synthesizing power of art.
It can seem hard these days to reconcile joy and outrage, hard to understand how a single history could contain so much pain alongside so much beauty, let alone one person’s artistic expression. But Ringgold demonstrated that an artist could make work about anything that struck her as worth thinking about, from the terrors of slavery to a simple bouquet. Her sensibility, her humanity, was strong enough to unify them all.
Take that story-quilt picture of a singer, “Mama Can Sing, Papa Can Blow #2: Come On Dance With Me.” At nearly seven feet tall, with a broad floral border and sewn-over edges, it’s unmistakably a quilt. But most of the surface area is canvas, and the figures are rendered in acrylic — so it’s obviously a painting, too. With their light blue outlines, the faces of the two horn players, the drummer and the singer have an iconic, mask-like quality. But the trumpet player’s subtle smile, the curve of the singer’s lips, the drummer’s knowing look are as individual as can be. The blue squiggles that surround the band are at once cartoony lines of motion or noise, a painterly way of filling the background and, as echoes of the sinuous form of the singer’s body, a subtle way of suggesting that it’s her emotional experience of the moment that fills the room. And the crowded composition — the way the flattened perspective crams the musicians and their instruments all on top of one another — serves to emphasize what might be the underlying truth of all of Ringgold’s work, which is that everything is happening all at once.
Faith Ringgold
Through Jan. 24, Jack Shainman Gallery, 46 Lafayette Street, Manhattan; 212-645-1701, jackshainman.com.
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