The Museum of Modern Art in New York City has acquired Faith Ringgold's, Die: American People #20 (1967). It is now on exhibit in "From the Collection: 1960-1969," until March, 2017.
More about Die...
The year 1967 was a transitional moment for the
rehabilitation of activist art and the formation of black identity. It
was
likewise significant for Faith Ringgold, who was
preparing the solo exhibition that would introduce her to the New York
art
world. That summer, after riots devastated Detroit
and Newark, NJ, she painted Die expressly for the show. The wall-size canvas depicts an interracial cast of clean-cut antagonists trying to kill one another.
Although the painting represented the kind
of large-scale, politically motivated figuration that had been out of
favor since
the 1940s, it earned favorable attention from key
art journals. I argue that its warm reception indexes the painting’s
ability
to speak differently to different constituencies,
from mainstream and African American modernists to the activists in the
Black Arts and peace movements then beginning to
make waves. The painting’s multivocal potential encompassed an
iconography
that reads as either warning against or wishing for
social unrest and a format that inserts the large-scale figuration of
public murals into the more rarified space of the
commercial art gallery.
As a microhistory focused on Die’s production and reception, this study aims to illuminate how racial politics influenced a politics of style in this volatile
moment. To do so, it situates Die in
relation to a mounting attention to protest, violence, social realism,
and black aesthetics, especially as they crystallized
in writer Amiri Baraka’s engagement with the Newark
riot and in gallery director Robert Newman’s facilitation of Ringgold’s
shift to large-scale imagery. [from Anne Monahan, "Faith Ringgold's Die: The Riot and its Reception," Nka 2015, Vol. 2015, No. 36, pp. 28-39.
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