The publication Faith Ringgold – Politics / Power provides detailed accounts on Faith Ringgold’s seminal artistic and activist work and its historical context between 1967 and 1981, including accounts by the artist herself on each artwork. Organized chronologically, the book allows readers to retrace the artist’s foundational creative approaches to contemporaneous social, political and artistic questions. It includes illustrations of individual artworks together with previously unpublished work and archival materials.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Ringgold, a dedicated and impassioned civil rights advocate, established her voice as a feminist and within the Black Arts Movement. She produced particularly impactful work in connection with her in-depth knowledge of art history and contemporary art as well as her political activism. Spanning media such as painting, cut paper works, posters, collage, and textile art, the works presented in this publication foregrounds the artist’s explicitly political work for which she deployed new material and formal processes and developed radical aesthetics and language that give her work and its uncompromising content exceptional intensity.

Faith Ringgold (born 1930) is a painter, mixed-media sculptor, performance artist, teacher and writer. In 2020, the New York Times described her as an artist “who has confronted race relations in this country from every angle, led protests to diversify museums decades ago, and even went to jail for an exhibition she organized.” Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art, among others. Ringgold lives and works in Englewood, New Jersey.