AMERICAN PEOPLE SERIES #20: DIE
FAITH RINGGOLD, 1967
The elevator opened straight into the gallery. 57th Street. Four blocks north of here. A woman stepped out, saw what was waiting on the far wall, and yelped. Then she got right back in. This is what she saw. The clothes are the first thing. White shirts. A tie. Office dresses. Good shoes. These aren't monsters from somewhere else. These are people who were at work an hour ago. And now they're tearing each other apart. Twelve feet across. Bodies packed to both edges, nobody with any room. Everyone's eyes too wide. A knife up in the corner. A gun just below it. And the blood lands on everybody. Black and white. Attacking and running. All of them spattered the same. Look at the floor. Grey squares. A tidy grid. The violence isn't breaking in from outside. It's happening on the nice clean tile. Then, low down near the middle, two children. One Black, one white, holding onto each other. Ringgold said they were trying to help each other out. Back at the opening, hundreds of people stayed. Her family. Her friends. Romare Bearden was there. Somebody put on Motown. And the children danced beneath the painting. Faith Ringgold painted this in 1967, the summer Newark burned, and then Detroit. She said she wanted to show what the fights were really about. Race and class. And nobody left out. Her own studio was too small, so she painted it in the empty gallery where it would hang. She'd been coming to this museum over and over to study one painting. Guernica. Picasso's mural of a bombed town. So she made her own. Not Spain. Here. She said the painting terrified her. She saw it as a prophecy. Nobody bought it. In 1969, Ringgold and the artist Tom Lloyd wrote to MoMA's director asking for a Martin Luther King Wing for Black and Puerto Rican art. They never got the wing. In 2016, MoMA bought the painting. From her. She'd kept it since those elevator doors opened.