History
Die was painted during the riots and uprisings of the 1960s and following the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X, and was finished the year before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the riots that followed. As the final work in The American People Series, Die represents the endpoint of the series' tonal shift from optimism to violence as the early successes of the Civil Rights Movement gave way to political assassinations and widespread bouts of violence in Black communities during the summer months. Ringgold was inspired to paint the work in part by her extensive viewing of Pablo Picasso's painting Guernica (1937) during its longterm loan to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York that began in 1939. [1] Additionally, Ringgold was inspired by Jacob Lawrence's reimaginings of historical portraiture. [1] [3]
Die was shown for the first time at Ringgold's debut solo show, American People, in 1967 at Spectrum Gallery in New York. [3] The opening reception for the show was attended by Romare Bearden and Richard Mayhew along with hundreds of the artist's friends and family; the gallery owner set up a record player and children danced to Motown music. [3] Ringgold has said that an unidentified woman at the reception, upon seeing Die when exiting the elevator into the gallery, immediately "let out a yelp" and left the building. [3] [9] The artist has referred to the work as a mural since its original showing, despite the fact that political murals by Black artists of the era were generally painted on buildings or shown in public spaces; critics have argued that this distinction was meant to communicate Ringgold's desire to bring Black artists, aesthetics, and politics into traditionally white institutional art spaces.
Following its original showing, Ringgold kept the work in storage along with The American People Series #18: The Flag is Bleeding (1967) for over 40 years. Prior to 2010, Die had only been brought out of storage for Ringgold's solo survey in 1973 at the Rutgers University Art Gallery, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and for Tradition and Conflict: Images of a Turbulent Decade, 1963-1967 (1985) at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The work was shown at Ringgold's retrospective American People, Black Light (2010) at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York, which traveled in 2013 to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. Following the retrospective, the work was shown in several exhibitions, including Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions (2014) at the Museu Picasso, Barcelona, and the original showing of Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (2017) at the Tate Modern, London. [12]
MoMA acquired the painting in 2016 directly from Ringgold and subsequently showed it in the museum next to Picasso's painting Les Demoiselles D'Avignon (1907) starting in 2019. [5] [3] MoMA's choice of placement for Die was widely discussed by critics, art historians, and artists, some of whom, including Helen Molesworth, believed that placing Die next to Les Demoiselles D'Avignon served only to reiterate Picasso's place in the canon. Others, including Mark Godfrey, believed the placement reflected Ringgold's own vision of "working [both] with and against the canon," as her work directly drew upon, acknowledged, and challenged canonical artistic figures like Picasso.
Following MoMA's acquisition of the work, Die was covered extensively in the media; the museum published Faith Ringgold: Die by Anne Monahan in 2018, from the One on One series of books focused on a single work, and the painting was reproduced on the cover of Artforum in January 2020. [14] Die was featured in the original showing of Ringgold's retrospective Faith Ringold: American People (2022) at the New Museum, New York, [4] and at Ringgold's first retrospective in France, Faith Ringgold: Black is Beautiful (2023) at the Musée Picasso, Paris. [15]
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and the anti-war painting Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. Born in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, he moved to the United States in 1926, becoming an American citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married painter Elaine Fried.
Robert Motherwell was an American abstract expressionist painter, printmaker, and editor of The Dada Painters and Poets: an Anthology. He was one of the youngest of the New York School, which also included Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.
Jay DeFeo was a visual artist who became celebrated in the 1950s as part of the spirited community of Beat artists, musicians, and poets in San Francisco. Best known for her monumental work The Rose, DeFeo produced courageously experimental works throughout her career, exhibiting what art critic Kenneth Baker called “fearlessness.”
Guernica is a large 1937 oil painting by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. It is one of his best-known works, regarded by many art critics as the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history. It is exhibited in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. was an American painter, sculptor and photographer.
Faith Ringgold was an American painter, author, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, and intersectional activist, perhaps best known for her narrative quilts.
Martin Kippenberger was a German artist known for his extremely prolific output in a wide range of styles and media, superfiction as well as his provocative, jocular and hard-drinking public persona.
Yasuo Kuniyoshi was an eminent 20th-century Japanese-American painter, photographer and printmaker.
Ellsworth Kelly was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color field painting and minimalism. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing line, color and form, similar to the work of John McLaughlin and Kenneth Noland. Kelly often employed bright colors. He lived and worked in Spencertown, New York.
Mickalene Thomas is a contemporary African-American visual artist best known as a painter of complex works using rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Thomas's collage work is inspired from popular art histories and movements, including Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, the Harlem Renaissance, and selected works by the Afro-British painter Chris Ofili. Her work draws from Western art history, pop art, and visual culture to examine ideas around femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and gender.
Charles Wilbert White, Jr. was an American artist known for his chronicling of African American related subjects in paintings, drawings, lithographs, and murals. White's lifelong commitment—to chronicling the triumphs and struggles of his community in representational form—cemented him as one of the most well-known artists in African American art history. Following his death in 1979, White's work has been included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, The Newark Museum, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. White's best known work is The Contribution of the Negro to American Democracy, a mural at Hampton University. In 2018, the centenary year of his birth, the first major retrospective exhibition of his work was organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art.
The Art Workers' Coalition (AWC) was an open coalition of artists, filmmakers, writers, critics, and museum staff that formed in New York City in January 1969. Its principal aim was to pressure the city's museums – notably the Museum of Modern Art – into implementing economic and political reforms. These included a more open and less exclusive exhibition policy concerning the artists they exhibited and promoted: the absence of women artists and artists of color was a principal issue of contention, which led to the formation of Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) in 1969. The coalition successfully pressured the MoMA and other museums into implementing a free admission day that still exists in certain museums to this day. It also pressured and picketed museums into taking a moral stance on the Vietnam War which resulted in its famous My Lai poster And babies, one of the most important works of political art of the early 1970s. The poster was displayed during demonstrations in front of Pablo Picasso′s Guernica at the MoMA in 1970.
Emma Amos was a postmodern African-American painter and printmaker.
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Yo, Picasso, is an oil-on-canvas painting by Pablo Picasso, which he painted in 1901. It is a self-portrait of the artist that depicts him in his youth, aged 19. The painting was created at the beginning of Picasso's Blue Period. On 9 May 1989, the painting sold at Sotheby's, achieving a price of $47.85 million, making it one of the most expensive paintings sold up to that date.
The American People Series #18: The Flag is Bleeding is an oil on canvas painting made by American artist Faith Ringgold in 1967. Widely cited as one of Ringgold's most iconic and pivotal works, the painting depicts a Black man, white woman, and white man interlocking arms inside the confines of an American flag dripping with blood, some of which is seemingly from a wound on the Black man's chest. The Flag is Bleeding was painted toward the end of the American Civil Rights movement and explores themes of race, gender, and patriotism.
The French Collection is a series of twelve quilt paintings by American artist Faith Ringgold completed between 1991 and 1997. Divided into two parts composed of eight and four quilts each, the series utilizes Ringgold's distinct style of story quilts to tell the fictional story of a young African American woman in the 1920s, Willia Marie Simone, who leaves Harlem for Paris to live as an artist and model. The stories, illustrated in acrylic paint and written in ink surrounding the paintings, narrate Willia Marie's journey as she befriends famous artists, performers, writers, and activists, runs a café and works as a painter, and develops a distinct Black feminist intellectual worldview based on her experiences and identity. Willia Marie's interactions with notable modernist artists and their oeuvres are an archetypical example of Ringgold's responses to the predominantly white male artistic canon, wherein she often directly invoked, embraced, and challenged the central figures of modernist art.
The American Collection is a series of eleven quilt paintings by American artist Faith Ringgold, completed in 1997, with an additional unfinished quilt that the artist sketched but did not complete. The series serves as a continuation of the narrative the artist began in her earlier series of quilt paintings The French Collection (1991-1997). While the quilts in The French Collection included detailed narratives written in text along the edges of each quilt, The American Collection quilts do not include stories in text and are meant to be understood as paintings by Marlena Simone, the daughter of the fictional central character from the earlier series.
