sᴇʟᴇᴄᴛᴇᴅ ᴀʀᴛᴡᴏʀᴋ: ғᴀɪᴛʜ ʀɪɴɢɢᴏʟᴅ, ᴀᴍᴇʀɪᴄᴀɴ ᴘᴇᴏᴘʟᴇ sᴇʀɪᴇs #20: ᴅɪᴇ, 1967

 

                73 - 75

╓═══════☆═══════╖

                Career

╙═══════☆═══════╜

born in NYC in 1930

grew up in Harlem, predominantly black neighborhood

Harlem Renaissance in 1920s, reverberate through her

childhood

1948 - study art at City College of New York

discover women not allowed to declare major in School

of Liberal Arts, major in art education instead

1955 - graduate

taught NYC public school system

1959 - masters degree

travel with mother and 2 daughters to Europe

late 1950s - making landscape paintings

1963 - showed them to gallerist Ruth White, encouraged to 

make political art

American People - set of 20 paintings, depict confrontations

between black and white Americans in cartoonish style

invoke modernist appropriations of African art (specifically

volumetric forms of African wood sculpture) by likes of

Pablo Picasso, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

choice of subject strongly influenced by writings of James

Baldwin, his thoughts on relationship between black and white

people, assimilation was misguided and dangerous goal

first solo show at NY's Spectrum Gallery

not widely exhibited in 1960s or after

1970s - thangkas - unstretched canvas with paintings, type

of Tibetan Buddhist painting, usually a scroll

1980s - incorporate quilted fabric in her work

arranged fabric fragments around edges of unstretched 

paintings, added narrative text (invented stories)

1968/1970 - organized demonstrations at Whitney Museum of

American Art to protest exclusion of women and poc

1969 - Art Workers Coalition, co led black coalition

╓═══════☆═══════╖

               Analysis

╙═══════☆═══════╜

2 panels, each 6x6 ft

scene of riot like 150+ race riots summer of 1967

gore engulfs everyone

only 2 adult male figures wield weapons

everyone implicated in racial violence

Picasso's 1937 Guernica on view at MoMA 

Jacob Lawrence - Great Migration series

in search of black aesthetic

18th work: The Flag is Burning, invoke work of Jasper Johns

highlights inherent political content and controversial status

as symbol of patriotism

Issue oriented art dismissed as bring naive

to be emotionally involved in art was considered primitive

╓═══════☆═══════╖

      African American Art

            in 60s & 70s

╙═══════☆═══════╜

mainstream art institutions neglect to seek African American

artists

Black Arts Movement - emerged in NY as offshoot of Black

Power Movement

began with poet Amiri Baraka's founding of Black Arts Repertory

Theater in Harlem in 1965

movement primarily literary, but also inspire musicians and

visual artists

MoMA mounted memorial exhibit following MLK's assassination

in 1968

American People exhibited at National Museum of Women in

the Arts in 2013

Die purchased by MoMA as part of effort to recuperate African

American art that has been historically excluded