Jack Shainman Gallery is honored to announce representation of the Estate of Faith Ringgold (1930-2024) and the Anyone Can Fly Foundation. The gallery is planning an exhibition dedicated to Ringgold’s work in November 2025 at its new flagship location in Tribeca, New York.
Over the course of six decades, American artist, author, educator and organizer Faith Ringgold became one of the most significant cultural figures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, one whose impact and influence continues to be seen in the political art of young Black artists working today. Restlessly creative and formally ambitious, Ringgold worked in a variety of media and modes - from quilts and paintings to performance and children’s books - to create an incisive and unflinching narrative about the historical sacrifices and achievements of Black Americans.
The extraordinary body of work that Ringgold created was born out of her political consciousness and activism of the 1960s and 1970s in Harlem, New York. She fused together her own unique style of figurative painting with a bold and innovative approach to the language of protest to create many of the most substantial artworks of the Civil Rights era. Ringgold’s desire to overcome the largely white, art historical tradition led her to search for forms more suitable for the exploration of gender and racial identity, forms she found during her travels abroad in the 1970s, first to Europe and then to Africa.
The soft sculptures, masks and unstretched canvases adorned with sewn fabric borders - inspired by Tibetan thangkas and which Ringgold called 'tankas' - were the result of these exploratory trips and each would influence the creation of her story quilt paintings of the 1980s and 1990s. Regularly combining her autobiography with scenes and episodes from the collective history of Black life in America, the story quilts are disarmingly intimate yet historically grand - they demonstrate the fundamental relation between the personal and the political that Ringgold's art always understood.
Gallery founder Jack Shainman states, 'It is an absolute privilege to be able to represent the Estate of Faith Ringgold and the Anyone Can Fly Foundation and to do our part in helping to further cement the legacy of an artist who played such a significant role in shaping the culture of American art. Faith Ringgold's work touches on themes that continue to be relevant to our current social and political climates, perhaps more so now than they have since their creation and I could not be more proud to have the opportunity to continue to give her and her work a platform.'
'Faith Ringgold’s life and work has been the source of inspiration, hope and guidance for so many, whether that be in the arts or the world of organizing and activism,' said Michele Wallace, daughter of Faith Ringgold. 'Jack Shainman Gallery’s long history of supporting Black American artists, while also helping to grow the institutional awareness and embrace of their work, aligns with Faith’s efforts and the mission of the Anyone Can Fly Foundation. We could not have imagined finding better partners to help us deepen the legacy of Faith Ringgold.'
photo: Meron Menghistab. Courtesy of the Anyone Can Fly Foundation and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
