Faith Ringgold Basel Unlimited 2024 - - Viewing Room

Goodman Gallery and ACA Galleries are proud to present the first major display of work by the acclaimed artist, author and activist Faith Ringgold taking place at Art Unlimited, Art Basel this June 2024.

The large-scale multimedia installation The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro will be premiered as a tribute to the pioneering artist whose significant career is also celebrated in a display at Kunsthaus Zürich in a show titled Faith Ringgold.Jazz Stories until 8 August 2024. Ringgold’s contribution to art and art history is belatedly being recognised, following a major US survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago - the most comprehensive exhibition of hers to date - which ended shortly before her death in Spring 2024.

Faith Ringgold Basel Unlimited 2024 - - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Faith Ringgold
The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro, 1976

Mixed media installation (life size)

Dimensions variable: minimum: 120 x 120 x 84 inches (304.8 x 304.8 x 213.4 cm);

maximum: 120 x 168 x 120 inches (304.8 x 426.7 x 304.8 cm)

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With a career spanning sixty years Ringgold is widely known for powerful works grounded in feminist and anti-racist foundations, tying together personal experience and collective histories.

With a career spanning sixty years Ringgold is widely known for powerful works grounded in feminist and anti-racist foundations, tying together personal experience and collective histories. Ringgold’s innovative use of quilting and storytelling techniques revolutionized the art world by bridging the gap between fine art and craft traditions. Recent survey shows, including Faith Ringgold: American People (2022) at New Museum (New York) and its extension Faith Ringgold: Black is beautiful at Musée National Picasso-Paris (2023), are testimony to the expanse of her practice and demonstrate how civil rights and social justice were at the core of her artistic impulses.

By the early 1970’s, Ringgold’s emerging feminist consciousness and growing interest in non-western art would inspire her first foray into textiles. The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro was Ringgold’s first masked performance work. It was conceived in response to the American Bicentennial celebrations of 1976. Bridging craft techniques with diverse ceremonial traditions, the installation demonstrates Ringgold’s pursuit in finding forms more suitable for the radical exploration of gender and racial identity themes central to her work.

In Faith’s words: ‘I certainly agreed with many black people at the time that we had no reason to celebrate 200 years of American independence; for almost half of that time we had been in slavery, and for most of the following years we had still been struggling to become fully free. So, this was a wake not a celebration. I wanted to create a visual narrative of the dynamics of racism…’

Faith Ringgold (b.1930, New York, USA - d. 2024, New Jersey, USA) was one of the most influential American cultural figures of her generation whose work has reflected her political activism and personal story within the context of the anti-racist and African American women’s movement.

Solo exhibitions include: Faith Ringgold: American People, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, (2023-24); Faith Ringgold: Black is beautiful, Musée National Picasso-Paris (2023); Faith Ringgold: American People, New Museum, New York (2022); Faith Ringgold, Serpentine Gallery, London (2019); Faith Ringgold: A Twenty-Five Year Survey, touring exhibition (1990-93); Fine Arts Museum of Long Island, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; The Arizona State Art Museum; Figge Art Museum, Davenport; University of Michigan Museum of Art; Women’s Center Gallery, University of California; Mills College Art Gallery, Oakland; and Tacoma Museum, Washington; and Twenty-Year Retrospective: Sculpture and Performance (1963-1984), The Studio Museum, New York.

Group exhibitions include: Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, The Broad, Los Angeles (2019) and Brooklyn Museum, New York (2018); We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2018) and Brooklyn Museum, New York (2017); Guerrilla Girls All-Woman, Palladium, New York (1985); Exhibition organised by Artists Against Apartheid (1984) and Benefit exhibition for Martin Luther King Jr., Museum of Modern Art, New York (1968).

Collections include: High Museum of Art, Atlanta; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Savannah College of Art, Georgia; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York City; Schomberg Library; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Studio Museum Harlem, New York; and The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia.

Awards and honours include: The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; two National Endowment for the Arts Awards; The American Academy of Arts and Letters Award and the Medal of Honor for Fine Arts from the National Arts Club. Ringgold received an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal College of Art, London (2013). Ringgold was elected as a member into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston, MA (2017).