The 1960s was a time of incredibly radical artistic production, but it was also a decade that bore witness to the protests, demonstrations, and riots of the Civil Rights Movement; the ongoing Vietnam War, in which many young American men were drafted and lost their lives or their livelihoods; and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. While the artists discussed in the preceding section responded to the tumultuous moment in which they found themselves by merging art and life through assemblage, Pop, and Fluxus, other artists found it imperative to go a step further and use their work to communicate explicit commentary on current events and politics. The artists discussed below tirelessly created artworks that spoke to specific issues, whether through the medium of sculptural tableaux, painting, or photomontage. While none of them believed that art could single-handedly change society, they all nevertheless believed that art ought to play a role in reflecting society back to itself, showing contemporary life for what it was—and hopefully, in the process, awakening their fellow citizens to injustice, violence, and prejudice.
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THE POLITICAL CONTEXT
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SELECTED ARTWORK: Edward Kienholz, The Portable War Memorial, 1968
Kienholz’s Early Career
Edward Kienholz was born in Fairfield, Washington, in 1927, and grew up on a wheat farm. He learned carpentry, metalwork, and car repair, all of which he would eventually put to use in making sculpture from found and salvaged objects. Kienholz briefly studied art at two regional colleges, but did not earn a degree. After spending seven years on the road doing odd jobs, from selling used cars and vacuum cleaners to working as an orderly in a psychiatric hospital, he moved to Los Angeles in 1952.
There he became involved in a burgeoning avant-garde art scene, and in 1955 he opened a gallery. In 1957 he founded another gallery, called Ferus, with curator Walter Hopps and poet Bob Alexander. Kienholz left after only a year to focus on his own art practice, but the gallery went on to mount legendary exhibitions, including Andy Warhol’s first solo show on the West Coast as well as the first solo exhibitions of many artists based in Southern California, including Wallace Berman, Ed Moses, Kenneth Price, Larry Bell, and Ed Ruscha.
Kienholz’s early work consisted of relief-collages assembled from materials he collected from the streets of Los Angeles, but he moved quickly to constructing large-scale works that he called tableaux, a French term for a picture, scene, or grouping, which, in Kienholz’s case, felt like it had been ripped from real life. His first such tableau, titled Roxy’s (1961), was a room-sized installation that replicated the interior of a 1940s brothel, complete with a gleaming jukebox and figures Kienholz crafted from bits of discarded junk and flea-market finds. Many of the artist’s tableaux addressed political issues, ranging from abortion to racial violence in the American South.
Edward Kienholz was born in Fairfield, Washington, in 1927, and grew up on a wheat farm. He learned carpentry, metalwork, and car repair, all of which he would eventually put to use in making sculpture from found and salvaged objects. Kienholz briefly studied art at two regional colleges, but did not earn a degree. After spending seven years on the road doing odd jobs, from selling used cars and vacuum cleaners to working as an orderly in a psychiatric hospital, he moved to Los Angeles in 1952.
There he became involved in a burgeoning avant-garde art scene, and in 1955 he opened a gallery. In 1957 he founded another gallery, called Ferus, with curator Walter Hopps and poet Bob Alexander. Kienholz left after only a year to focus on his own art practice, but the gallery went on to mount legendary exhibitions, including Andy Warhol’s first solo show on the West Coast as well as the first solo exhibitions of many artists based in Southern California, including Wallace Berman, Ed Moses, Kenneth Price, Larry Bell, and Ed Ruscha.
Kienholz’s early work consisted of relief-collages assembled from materials he collected from the streets of Los Angeles, but he moved quickly to constructing large-scale works that he called tableaux, a French term for a picture, scene, or grouping, which, in Kienholz’s case, felt like it had been ripped from real life. His first such tableau, titled Roxy’s (1961), was a room-sized installation that replicated the interior of a 1940s brothel, complete with a gleaming jukebox and figures Kienholz crafted from bits of discarded junk and flea-market finds. Many of the artist’s tableaux addressed political issues, ranging from abortion to racial violence in the American South.
"I mostly think of my work as the spoor of an animal that goes through the forest and makes a thought trail, and the viewer is the hunter who comes and follows the trail. At one point I as the trail-maker disappear. The viewer then is confronted with the dilemma of ideas and directions." Ed Kienholz
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Larger Context: From Assemblage to Tableaux
Robert Rauschenberg had pioneered post-war assemblage with his Combines, which merged found objects with painted flourishes, bringing together sculpture, everyday life, and the legacy of Abstract Expressionist painting. Kienholz’s subsequent development of assemblage into three dimensions, often at a monumental scale, was similar to Allan Kaprow’s progression from assemblages to environments to Happenings. One of Kaprow’s friends, the sculptor George Segal, who hosted many Happenings on his farm in New Jersey, also began making tableaux in the mid-1960s, though typically with figures he cast from real-life models using plaster bandages that hardened when dry. Segal’s works evoked real spaces, such as the marquee of a movie theater or the booth of a diner, but his early figures were always painted white and his use of found objects was fairly minimal compared to the riot of junk that characterized Kienholz’s work. While Segal’s work often consequently reads as self- contained sculpture, Kaprow’s and Kienholz’s more radical occupation of space informed the creation of a new genre called installation art, which entails a typically large-scale (often room-sized) artwork that a viewer must walk through or around in order to experience it. Kienholz was especially influential in his incorporation of sound into tableaux, which remains a common feature of contemporary installation art today.
Although Kienholz’s work seems insistently material, he also made contributions to the burgeoning movement known as Conceptual art through his Concept Tableaux, begun around 1966. Each work consisted of a paragraph or two describing a proposed tableau; Kienholz simply framed and sold the sheet of paper (which sometimes had an accompanying plaque), and the purchaser could, in theory, realize the tableau according to the description. The majority of the tableaux, however, did not result in three-dimensional work, existing only as an idea through Kienholz’s words.
Although Kienholz’s work seems insistently material, he also made contributions to the burgeoning movement known as Conceptual art through his Concept Tableaux, begun around 1966. Each work consisted of a paragraph or two describing a proposed tableau; Kienholz simply framed and sold the sheet of paper (which sometimes had an accompanying plaque), and the purchaser could, in theory, realize the tableau according to the description. The majority of the tableaux, however, did not result in three-dimensional work, existing only as an idea through Kienholz’s words.
The Portable War Memorial: Analysis
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Made in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, The Portable War Memorial brings the violence of the war into confrontation with symbols of patriotism and small-town and suburban America. Measuring 33 feet long and standing at the height of a low building, the tableau occupies the entirety of a typical museum gallery. It brings together a disparate series of objects and vignettes, including a life-sized photograph of a hot dog and chili shop placed next to a Coke machine that once dispensed actual bottles of soda; three sets of patio chairs and tables; a replica of the Uncle Sam “I Want You” poster from World War I; a giant blackboard tombstone listing the names of 475 countries that no longer exist; and a grouping of five figures, cast from life, that replicates the famous image of soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima during World War II—except that in Kienholz’s rendition, they are hoisting the flag into one of the patio tables, into the hole where an umbrella would normally be placed. To the left of the faceless soldiers is an overturned trash can that has been given a head and legs, from which emanates the sound of Kate Smith’s famous World War II-era recording of Irving Berlin’s patriotic tune “God Bless America.”
Kienholz unifies the many component parts of The Portable War Memorial by applying a dull aluminum finish to everything, in a poor man’s attempt at creating a bonafide memorial in bronze or marble. The makeshift quality of the work seems appropriate considering the war Kienholz is memorializing is far from over. Memorials tend only to be erected long after a tragic event has passed, making it somewhat extraordinary that Kienholz would construct a memorial while the war was ongoing. The work does suggest, in referencing a number of military conflicts, that it is in fact a lament for war in general, and more specifically for the ability of Americans to carry on normally—eating hot dogs, drinking Cokes—while violent conflict takes place elsewhere in their names. Kienholz, like many artists who desired to highlight and dramatize the implications of war on life at home in America, hoped that his work might help to further mobilize the American public, which had to a certain extent already lost faith in the war but had not yet successfully rallied to demand its end.
SELECTED ARTWORK: MARTHA ROSLER, RED STRIPE KITCHEN,
FROM THE SERIES “HOUSE BEAUTIFUL: BRINGING THE WAR HOME,” c. 1967–72
FROM THE SERIES “HOUSE BEAUTIFUL: BRINGING THE WAR HOME,” c. 1967–72
Rosler’s Career
Martha Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York. (Rosler has objected to publishing her birthdate because she believes that including it commodifies living artists in a way that is not applied to other professions.) She graduated from Brooklyn College in 1965 and moved to California in 1968, where she remained until 1980. She received a master’s degree in fine art from the University of California, San Diego, in 1974, and subsequently spent a number of years in San Francisco before returning to New York. Both San Diego and San Francisco during that time were hotbeds of the feminist and antiwar movements, with which Rosler became involved as an activist and artist.
In the mid-1960s, Rosler began making photomontages by cutting photographic images from magazines and newspapers and rearranging them into new works. Her series “Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain,” made approximately between 1966 and 1972, deconstructs the way women are represented in mainstream magazines. She also took aim at the institutions of art in her montages: in the work Vacuuming Pop Art, or Woman with Vacuum, she depicts a woman vacuuming a hallway populated with well-known works of Pop art, hinting both at the exclusion of women from that art movement and at women’s confinement to domestic roles as representing their marginalization. Rosler’s photomontages are impeccably assembled, remaining complex and aesthetically compelling while also communicating biting social criticism.
In the early 1970s, Rosler took up the fairly new medium of video art and turned the camera on the same conditions of subjugation and inequality that she addressed in her photomontages. Her 1975 video Semiotics of the Kitchen, which remains her best known, is an approximately six-minute-long black-and-white video in which Rosler, standing in a kitchen, illustrates the alphabet from A to Z, beginning by donning an apron (for the letter “a”) and continuing on by holding up and demonstrating a single utensil for each letter, e.g., “eggbeater” for the letter “e” and “fork” for the letter “f.” Her demonstrations become increasingly violent and humorous, challenging the image of the contented housewife. For the last few letters, she uses only her body to represent them. The work is ultimately a commentary on how the semiotics of the kitchen—the symbolic language that defines the space—is a tool of women’s oppression, which, however, can be harnessed and undermined, as Rosler shows when she finally traces out the letter “z” by aggressively gesturing with a knife as if she were the bandit figure Zorro.
Martha Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York. (Rosler has objected to publishing her birthdate because she believes that including it commodifies living artists in a way that is not applied to other professions.) She graduated from Brooklyn College in 1965 and moved to California in 1968, where she remained until 1980. She received a master’s degree in fine art from the University of California, San Diego, in 1974, and subsequently spent a number of years in San Francisco before returning to New York. Both San Diego and San Francisco during that time were hotbeds of the feminist and antiwar movements, with which Rosler became involved as an activist and artist.
In the mid-1960s, Rosler began making photomontages by cutting photographic images from magazines and newspapers and rearranging them into new works. Her series “Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain,” made approximately between 1966 and 1972, deconstructs the way women are represented in mainstream magazines. She also took aim at the institutions of art in her montages: in the work Vacuuming Pop Art, or Woman with Vacuum, she depicts a woman vacuuming a hallway populated with well-known works of Pop art, hinting both at the exclusion of women from that art movement and at women’s confinement to domestic roles as representing their marginalization. Rosler’s photomontages are impeccably assembled, remaining complex and aesthetically compelling while also communicating biting social criticism.
In the early 1970s, Rosler took up the fairly new medium of video art and turned the camera on the same conditions of subjugation and inequality that she addressed in her photomontages. Her 1975 video Semiotics of the Kitchen, which remains her best known, is an approximately six-minute-long black-and-white video in which Rosler, standing in a kitchen, illustrates the alphabet from A to Z, beginning by donning an apron (for the letter “a”) and continuing on by holding up and demonstrating a single utensil for each letter, e.g., “eggbeater” for the letter “e” and “fork” for the letter “f.” Her demonstrations become increasingly violent and humorous, challenging the image of the contented housewife. For the last few letters, she uses only her body to represent them. The work is ultimately a commentary on how the semiotics of the kitchen—the symbolic language that defines the space—is a tool of women’s oppression, which, however, can be harnessed and undermined, as Rosler shows when she finally traces out the letter “z” by aggressively gesturing with a knife as if she were the bandit figure Zorro.
Historical Development of Photomontage
When Rosler took up photomontage as a medium for social criticism, she called up a longer history of photomontage that stretches back to its first innovators, the Berlin-based Dadaist artists Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, George Grosz, and John Heartfield. In Paris, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque had experimented with Cubist cut-paper collage as early as 1912, a radical invention that brought scraps of mass culture—whether newspaper clippings or bits of wallpaper—into the realm of fine art, which had to that point excluded non-artistic materials. Several years later in Berlin, Dadaist artists who were looking for a way to intervene in mass culture and criticize the bourgeois establishment turned to the relatively new photography magazines that were being published alongside increasing numbers of photographs in newspapers, and started excising and borrowing photographic images as Picasso and Braque had done with texts and patterns. Though it is unclear which of the four Dadaists invented photomontage (all of them claimed it), all used the medium for what they saw as its political potential. Hannah Höch, for example, in her large-scale montage with the elaborate title Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, combined images of leisure and entertainment with the portraits of well-known political figures, putting them in compromising and irreverent positions that poked fun at the Weimar government.
Rosler’s photomontages also alluded to a more recent precedent than Dada, namely British artist Richard Hamilton’s 1956 photomontage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, which is often referred to as the very first work of Pop art. Hamilton uses a domestic interior as his base and pastes on top of it all sorts of images, including what looks like a painting by Jackson Pollock (which becomes a rug) and the proportionally tiny figure of a woman vacuuming the staircase—perhaps a reference for some of Rosler’s feminist photomontages, made a decade later. Whereas the Dadaists used montage to critique society, Hamilton’s work left the question of criticism a bit more ambiguous, an ambivalent attitude that would come to characterize much Pop art.
Rosler’s photomontages also alluded to a more recent precedent than Dada, namely British artist Richard Hamilton’s 1956 photomontage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, which is often referred to as the very first work of Pop art. Hamilton uses a domestic interior as his base and pastes on top of it all sorts of images, including what looks like a painting by Jackson Pollock (which becomes a rug) and the proportionally tiny figure of a woman vacuuming the staircase—perhaps a reference for some of Rosler’s feminist photomontages, made a decade later. Whereas the Dadaists used montage to critique society, Hamilton’s work left the question of criticism a bit more ambiguous, an ambivalent attitude that would come to characterize much Pop art.
“HOUSE BEAUTIFUL: BRINGING THE WAR HOME”:
ANALYSIS OF TWO MONTAGES Red Stripe Kitchen & Balloons
In 1967, in the midst of the Vietnam War, Rosler began a photomontage series she named “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home.” In the series, Rosler combines high modernist design from the pages of so-called “shelter magazines,” dedicated to showing impressive domestic interiors, with photojournalistic images of the Vietnam War culled from newspapers and current events magazines such as Life. Two representative montages from the series amply demonstrate the point Rosler wanted to make. The montage Red Stripe Kitchen shows a pristine white kitchen with a wrap-around countertop laid out with cherry red dinnerware and black appliances—a white, black, and red palette that invokes modernist design and Russian Constructivist montage. In the background, in a hallway that borders the kitchen, two soldiers are hunched over, looking for something in the tiled floors. The jarring juxtaposition literally “brings the war home,” highlighting the absurdity of advertising and valorizing such highly aestheticized modernism in American homes while American soldiers invade the homes of others abroad.
The montage Balloons, so named for the artful pile of balloons that appear in the corner of the elegant living room, shows a Vietnamese woman carrying an injured, half-clothed infant up the stairs of the house. This montage and several others from the series recall the phrase “living-room war,” which was applied to the Vietnam War because it was the first American military conflict that the majority of Americans watched unfolding on television, from the comfort of their own living rooms.
Echoing Dadaist John Heartfield’s publication of photomontages on the cover of the German magazine Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (Workers’ Illustrated Magazine), Rosler published her “House Beautiful” montages in underground newspapers that sprang up in the 1960s to publish literature opposing the Vietnam War, thereby reinserting her images into the media from which she had plucked their component parts. Her primary mode of distribution, however, was to make black-and-white photocopies of the works and hand them out at demonstrations. While on the one hand critical of the ability of the mainstream media to mobilize Americans against what she perceived to be an unjust and brutal war, her decision to hand out multiple copies of these photomontages and to publish them in newspapers (rather than exhibit them as singular artworks) speaks to her persistent faith in the ability of mass reproduction and communication to effect change.
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SELECTED ARTWORK:
FAITH RINGGOLD, AMERICAN PEOPLE SERIES #20: DIE, 1967
Ringgold’s Career
Faith Ringgold was born in New York City in 1930. She grew up in Harlem, a predominantly black neighborhood that had given rise to the “Harlem Renaissance,” a movement of African-American art, literature, and music that reached its zenith in the late 1920s, but continued to reverberate throughout Ringgold’s childhood. In 1948, Ringgold enrolled to study art at the City College of New York, but upon discovering that women were not allowed to declare a major in the School of Liberal Arts, she wound up studying art education instead. After graduating in 1955, she taught in the New York City public school system and earned a master’s degree in 1959, after which she traveled with her mother and two daughters to Europe, a trip that gave her the opportunity to see the art of the Western canon in person.
In the late 1950s Ringgold was also making landscape paintings, but when she showed them to gallerist Ruth White in 1963, she was counseled to think about making paintings that were responsive to the political tumult of the moment. As Ringgold recounted later, “Some people might have been upset or hurt by [White’s advice]. But I was happy that she had the courage to tell me that.” The encounter led Ringgold to shift course dramatically, and she set about making a series of twenty paintings titled “The American People,” each of which depicts a confrontation between white and black Americans in a uniquely cartoonish, Pop style that also invoked modernist appropriations of African art (specifically the volumetric forms of African wood sculpture) by the likes of Pablo Picasso and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. (Ringgold called her style “Super-Realism.”) Her choice of subject matter for the series was strongly influenced by the writings of James Baldwin, specifically his thoughts on the relationship between white and black people in America and his belief that assimilation was a misguided and even dangerous goal.
In the late 1950s Ringgold was also making landscape paintings, but when she showed them to gallerist Ruth White in 1963, she was counseled to think about making paintings that were responsive to the political tumult of the moment. As Ringgold recounted later, “Some people might have been upset or hurt by [White’s advice]. But I was happy that she had the courage to tell me that.” The encounter led Ringgold to shift course dramatically, and she set about making a series of twenty paintings titled “The American People,” each of which depicts a confrontation between white and black Americans in a uniquely cartoonish, Pop style that also invoked modernist appropriations of African art (specifically the volumetric forms of African wood sculpture) by the likes of Pablo Picasso and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. (Ringgold called her style “Super-Realism.”) Her choice of subject matter for the series was strongly influenced by the writings of James Baldwin, specifically his thoughts on the relationship between white and black people in America and his belief that assimilation was a misguided and even dangerous goal.
Paintings from “The American People” were included in Ringgold’s first solo show at New York’s Spectrum Gallery, but the series was not widely exhibited in the 1960s or after. Ringgold changed course again in the 1970s, shifting to paintings made on unstretched canvas that she called thangkas, after a type of Tibetan Buddhist painting that is usually on a scroll that can be rolled up and transported. The thangkas led Ringgold, in the early 1980s, to incorporate quilted fabric into her work, an innovation that simultaneously invoked American craft, women’s work (which was often communal), and Southern culture with African roots. (Her great-great-great-grandmother had, in fact, been a slave who made quilts for her plantation owners, giving Ringgold’s turn to quilting a strong biographical charge as well.) Ringgold arranged fabric fragments around the edges of unstretched paintings and added narrative text, usually stories that she invented and sometimes elaborated across several related works, creating a new hybrid art form for which she remains best known.
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Alongside her work, Ringgold joined other artists in protesting the inequitable conditions of the New York art world and became a prominent activist. In 1968 and 1970, she organized demonstrations at the Whitney Museum of American Art to protest the exclusion of women and people of color from their exhibitions. She also co-led a black coalition within the Art Workers Coalition, an organization founded in 1969 to advocate for artists’ rights; although the group included artists of all colors, they made it a top priority to advocate for greater inclusion of black artists in major institutions. Over more than a decade, Ringgold participated in such demonstrations and designed posters to advertise their cause.
American People Series #20: Die:
Analysis
Stretching across two panels, each six feet long and six feet tall, is a jumbled mess of figures, men and women, black and white. The scene is of a bloodbath, a race riot or rebellion like the more than fifty that took place in the summer of 1967, when Ringgold made this painting as one of the final works in her “American People” series. The gore of the scene engulfs everyone, including the two tiny figures, presumably children, clutching each other in fear at the center. Ringgold’s male aggressors wear crisp business attire—white shirts and black slacks—while her female figures sport mod dresses in shades of yellow, pink, and peach with matching high-heeled shoes. Close attention to the work reveals that only the two adult male figures (one white, one black) wield weapons, but everybody, even the terrified women and children, is implicated in racial violence, a reality with which many white and black people on the sidelines struggled to come to terms.
While clearly based in the contemporary political moment, Ringgold’s painting also strongly references a number of art-historical precedents, most notably Pablo Picasso’s monumental 1937 canvas Guernica, which was on view at the Museum of Modern Art at the time that Ringgold was working on her paintings. Guernica memorialized the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War with a topsy-turvy composition of figures very similar to the structure of Die. Ringgold’s painting also reprised elements of the race riot panel in Jacob Lawrence’s well known Great Migration series, in which a number of figures float across the canvas, weapons drawn.
While clearly based in the contemporary political moment, Ringgold’s painting also strongly references a number of art-historical precedents, most notably Pablo Picasso’s monumental 1937 canvas Guernica, which was on view at the Museum of Modern Art at the time that Ringgold was working on her paintings. Guernica memorialized the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War with a topsy-turvy composition of figures very similar to the structure of Die. Ringgold’s painting also reprised elements of the race riot panel in Jacob Lawrence’s well known Great Migration series, in which a number of figures float across the canvas, weapons drawn.
Ringgold invoked these precedents and made them her own, in search of what she has called a “black aesthetic,” as she did with the eighteenth work in the “American People” series, The Flag is Bleeding, which would have invoked the work of Jasper Johns for the art-going public. Whereas Johns claimed to use the flag simply as an instantly recognizable symbol, Ringgold highlights its inherent political content and its controversial status as a sign of patriotism, democracy, and freedom in the 1960s. She was well aware that she was taking significant risks in creating work so explicitly political. In her autobiography, she wrote:
Mainstream art was the art of the sixties, despite the ‘revolution’ going on in the street. The art was cool, unemotional, uninvolved, and not ‘about’ anything. Issue-oriented art was dismissed as being naïve, if not downright vulgar. Art was a conceptual or material process, a commodity and not a political platform. Most mainstream artists, black as well as white, agreed on that. To be emotionally involved in art was considered primitive.
Mainstream art was the art of the sixties, despite the ‘revolution’ going on in the street. The art was cool, unemotional, uninvolved, and not ‘about’ anything. Issue-oriented art was dismissed as being naïve, if not downright vulgar. Art was a conceptual or material process, a commodity and not a political platform. Most mainstream artists, black as well as white, agreed on that. To be emotionally involved in art was considered primitive.
Reception of African-American Art in the U.S. in the ’60s and ’70s
Mainstream arts institutions in the 1960s and ’70s often neglected to seek out African-American artists, exhibiting instead primarily white (and male) artists, as Ringgold herself vigorously protested. They did so despite the flowering of artistic production around the Black Arts Movement, which emerged in New York as an offshoot of the contemporaneous Black Power Movement. It began with poet Amiri Baraka’s founding of the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem in 1965 and constituted a latter-day Harlem Renaissance, though with the even more explicit ambition of making black art for Black people in order to awaken Black consciousness and create the conditions for liberation from racism and prejudice. The movement was primarily literary but inspired many musicians and visual artists as well, including Ringgold.
Powerful arts institutions largely ignored Black art at the time (although the Museum of Modern Art, interestingly, mounted a memorial exhibition following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968), but they have been actively “re-discovering” and exhibiting that history over the last decade, with major traveling shows dedicated to Black art in the 1960s and ’70s. Ringgold herself has experienced renewed interest, especially after her “American People” series, which had been largely forgotten since the 1960s, was exhibited at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 2013. The painting Die was subsequently purchased by the Museum of Modern Art as part of their public effort to recuperate African-American art that has been historically excluded from or minimized in their collection.
Powerful arts institutions largely ignored Black art at the time (although the Museum of Modern Art, interestingly, mounted a memorial exhibition following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968), but they have been actively “re-discovering” and exhibiting that history over the last decade, with major traveling shows dedicated to Black art in the 1960s and ’70s. Ringgold herself has experienced renewed interest, especially after her “American People” series, which had been largely forgotten since the 1960s, was exhibited at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 2013. The painting Die was subsequently purchased by the Museum of Modern Art as part of their public effort to recuperate African-American art that has been historically excluded from or minimized in their collection.