The estate of Faith Ringgold, an acclaimed artist known for works that directly and bracingly protest racism, has joined New York’s Jack Shainman Gallery.
Prior to her death in 2024, Ringgold had long been represented by ACA Galleries, which had shown her work since 1995. But now, her estate will be exclusively represented by Jack Shainman, whose roster also counts El Anatsui, Nick Cave, Kerry James Marshall, Gordon Parks, Rose B. Simspon, and a variety of other well-known artists.
Also joining the gallery alongside the estate is the Anyone Can Fly Foundation, an organization that Ringgold established in 1999. Its goal is “to expand the art establishment’s canon to include artists of the African Diaspora and to introduce the Great Masters of African American Art and their art traditions to children and adult audiences,” according to its mission statement.
That, in a way, was also the goal of Ringgold’s art, which took the form of paintings, prints, quilts, children’s books, and more. From the ’60s onward, she used her work to highlight the racism, sexism, and classism that Black women like herself commonly faced.
Her figurative paintings from the ’60s, in which multiracial casts of people bear witness to ugly forms of violence, have figured prominently in retrospectives, including ones staged at New York’s New Museum, the Serpentine Galleries in London, and the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland.
At the 2019 rehang of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Ringgold’s 1964 painting American People Series #20: Die, featuring a tumult of Black and white figures amid sprays of blood, received widespread acclaim for its placement in the modern art galleries, next to Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Her illustrated books for children have also been read in schools across the US. (This summer, those books will also be the subject of a large-scale show at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.)
Lately, as Ringgold’s work has gained mainstream fame, her art has even become a fixture in other industries. Just after her death last year, Dior even decked out its runway in patterning that explicitly recalled Ringgold’s paintings of the ’70s, which were based on Kuba textiles.
The widespread presence of her work in various industries can make it easy to forget just how revolutionary Ringgold was during her day. “There weren’t portraits of Black people” in mainstream spaces back then, dealer Jack Shainman told ARTnews. “She was doing something that hadn’t been done, fighting for a cause.”
Moreover, he pointed out, Ringgold was working with figures and fiber, and for nearly all of her career, neither of those things were popular among critics. “She had her own vision, and that’s what young artists should know,” Shainman said. “She did what she believed in, and it wasn’t of the fashion of the time.”
Shainman’s gallery is planning its first Ringgold exhibition for November of this year at its recently opened Tribeca gallery.
His gallery’s roster is already rich with giants, from Toyin Ojih Odutola to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and he said that Ringgold fits well among them. “Taking her on and working with her,” he continued, “it’s like having another soprano in the chorus.”
