American People, Black Light

Book excerpt: Faith Ringgold (born 1930) is famed today as the progenitor of the African-American story-quilt revival of the late 1970s, but her story begins much earlier, with her American People Series of 1963. These once influential paintings, and the many political posters and murals she created throughout the 1960s, have largely disappeared from view, being routinely omitted from art historical discourse over the past 40 years. American People, Black Light is the first examination of Ringgold's earliest radical and pioneering explorations of race, gender and class. Undertaken to address the social upheavals of the 1960s, these are the works through which Ringgold found her political voice. American People, Black Light offers not only clear insight into a critical moment in American history, but also a clear account of what it meant to be an African American woman making her way as an artist at that time.