Faith Ringgold: A Survey
Faith Ringgold: A Survey at Jeffrey Deitch is the celebrated artist’s first survey exhibition in Los Angeles. Realized in close collaboration with ACA Galleries, the overview features artwork from the 1960s to the present demonstrating her career-spanning commitment to social justice and equity through a variety of media including oil paintings, tankas, soft sculptures, story quilts and prints. The artworks in the exhibition weave together autobiographic details, fictional accounts and historic events into ambitious narratives that speak to universal truths of the human condition.
Oil paintings from the 1960s begin Ringgold’s investigation into the complexities of gender and racial identities in America and set the stage for the next five decades of work. The political posters, soft sculptures, masks and tankas the artist produced in the 1970s continue her advocacy for political and societal change while challenging the historical divisions between fine art, graphic design and craft. The tankas’ use of written words within figurative paintings, framed by pieced fabric borders are the precursors to her well-known story-quilts created between 1980 and 2010. The exhibition includes two new silkscreen editions: Dancing on the George Washington Bridge 2 (2021) printed on silk with unique hand quilted borders, and Woman Looking in a Mirror 2 (2022), an edition based on the 1966 painting of the same title.
This exhibition coincides with Ringgold’s first major traveling retrospective appearing first in New York at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (February 17-June 5, 2022); the DeYoung Museum, San Francisco (July 16–November 27, 2022); Musée Picasso, Paris (January 31 – July 2, 2023) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (November 18, 2023 – February 25, 2024).
Faith Ringgold is an artist, activist, educator and author of numerous award-winning children’s books. Tar Beach, her first children’s book based on a quilt of the same title, has won over twenty awards including the Caldecott Honor and the Coretta Scott King award for the best-illustrated children’s book of 1991.
Ringgold is the recipient of more than eighty awards and honors including the Simon Guggenheim Award for Painting (1987) and two National Endowment for the Arts Awards in sculpture (1978) and painting (1989). Most recently she was elected as a member into The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, MA (2017) and The American Academy of Arts and Letters, NY (2021). She received the Louis Auchincloss Prize from the Museum of the City of New York (2021) and will be the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Gold Medal for Painting in May 2023. She has been presented with twenty-six Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees.
Ringgold’s artwork is in the permanent collections of numerous museums in the United States and abroad including Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Boston Museum of Fine Art, MA; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, MD; High Museum, Atlanta, GA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Gallery, Washington, DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY and Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England. ACA Galleries has been the exclusive representative of Faith Ringgold since 1995.