She fought for better representation of black people and women in art: the American artist Faith Ringgold, who explored the racial question in the United States throughout her life, died on Saturday March 13 at the age of 93, announced the American media.
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Considered a pioneering artist for African-Americans, Faith Ringgold had gained international recognition with exhibitions in New York, at the Picasso Museum in Paris in 2023 or during a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, until February 25.
Born in Harlem in 1930, right in the middle of the Renaissance cultural movement in this famous African-American district of New York, she distinguished herself through very visual arts, such as her canvas panels mixing paint and fabrics, to tell the life of black people in the United States.
Next to the “Demoiselles d’Avignon”
His work began in 1963, against a backdrop of racial segregation in the United States, with the series “The American people“, inspired by the civil rights movement and who attempted to explore race relations in her country. An activist and activist, she became known in the 1970s through a demonstration of her movement (“Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists “) in front of the famous Whitney Museum in New York, to demand better representation of women in art.
Inspired by Picasso, she had seen one of his works, American People Series #20: Die (1967), a representation of racial revolts in the United States, exhibited right next to the Ladies of Avignon (1907) by the Spanish master at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. The artist had also been commissioned for public works such as mural mosaics in the subway in Harlem, representing figures like Sugar Ray Robinson or Malcolm X.
And one of his compositions, “9/11 Peace Story Quilt“, ten years after the jihadist attacks of September 11, 2001 against the United States, and in which students participated, was exhibited at the prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.