In a 70-year career, Ringgold has shown the US its bloody, brutal side. And yet the artist started out wanting to paint landscapes … She talks about growing up during the Harlem Renaissance, her battles with the establishment and her latest Trump the Chump series
It looks a long way down from the window of Faith Ringgold’s attic studio to her snow-covered garden in Englewood, New Jersey. Her friend and longtime gallerist Dorian Bergen is holding the phone aloft, giving me a video tour of an impressively ordered room. There is a long work table in the middle, with paints of every kind and colour at one end, and canvasses piled high, ready for use, at the other. Hung on one wall are two framed quilt editions from Ringgold’s Coming to Jones Road series, inspired by her move to this very house 28 years ago, when the neighbours’ hostile reception ended in a court case. Ringgold herself – now aged 90, and regal with it – sits by that window with its vertiginous view, as if on a throne backlit by the sun.
In a 70-year career spanning the US’s 20th-century social revolutions, the artist, activist and children’s author has infused the US art establishment with traditions that had previously been systematically excluded: west African; African American; the work of women; and the perspectives of children. But while her famous fans include Oprah Winfrey and Hillary Clinton, it is only in the past five years that the art world has come to appreciate the full scope of her legacy.
