Like many feminist-aligned artists in the 1970s, Faith Ringgold embraced collaboration as a politically significant part of her practice. Ringgold’s primary collaborator was her own mother, the fashion designer and dress maker Willi Posey. Mrs. Jones and Family (1973, also known as Mrs. Jones, Andrew, Barbara, and Faith) was created with Posey, who designed and sewed garments for many of Ringgold‘s mask sculptures throughout the 1970s. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Mrs. Jones and Family By Faith Ringgold→
American People, Faith Ringgold’s first exhibition outside Harlem, opened at Spectrum Gallery on 57th Street in December 1967. The exhibition featured her three murals, including U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating The Advent of Black Power (1967). Despite Ringgold’s determination to exhibit her paintings throughout the mid-1960s, she initially met with little success. The white-owned commercial galleries on 57th Street were dismissive, and Spiral, identified affectionately as the “old men of Black art“ by the painter Vivian Brown, declined to admit her into the group. But following public displays of her work in Harlem in 1966 — including in a traveling caravan exhibition organized by Amiri Baraka “(then LeRoi Jones) and Betty Blayton-Taylor for the Black Arts Repertory Theater — she was invited to join the cooperative Spectrum Gallery, where New York school abstraction was still prominent and every artist on the roster except Ringgold was white.
