Eliana Willis

When the Whitney Biennial was founded in 1932, it was conceived as a bellwether survey of U.S. art from the preceding two years. That’s still loosely the idea driving the museum’s signature show, even if its mission has gotten much more fluid over the ensuing 90 years. 
The newest iteration of the Biennial, “Quiet as It’s Kept,” is proof of this broadening. It will bring together 63 artists and collectives whose work spans generations, mediums, and—perhaps most notably—geographic borders. 
For curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, organizing a show with the aim of drawing conclusions about the state of art today would be an irresponsible exercise at the best of times. But in 2022—after a pandemic, a presidential election, and a spate of global protests—generalizations are simply unthinkable. Instead, the 80th Whitney Biennial reflects the precarity of our moment. 
“Rather than proposing a unified theme, we pursue a series of hunches throughout the exhibition,” the curators explained earlier this year upon announcing the show. Among those “hunches” are “that personal narratives sifted through political, literary, and pop cultures can address larger social frameworks” and “that artworks can complicate what ‘American’ means by addressing the country’s physical and psychological boundaries.”
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For the last Biennial in 2019, Artnet News surveyed recent examples of the Whitney’s show to identify patterns among participants. With a new entry onto the list, we have a new set of observations. 
For one, this year’s participants are a little older, on average, than those of previous years. Of the 2022 artists, 31 are under 40, while 23 fall on the other side of that line.
Puerto Rican choreographer Awilda Sterling-Duprey, born in 1947, is the oldest of the bunch. The youngest is Mexican video artist Andrew Roberts, born in 1995. Five artists (Steve Cannon, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha N. H. Pritchard, Jason Rhoades, and Denyse Thomasos) are deceased—an uncommonly high figure for an exhibition so ostensibly tethered to the present.  
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Visitors will almost certainly discover at least some new names at the exhibition next month, if not many. Refreshingly, you’ll find just seven of the Biennial’s artists on the rosters of the country’s four biggest galleries (that is, David Zwirner, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, and Pace Gallery).
The vast majority of participants do, however, hail from coastal hubs. Twenty-three, or 36 percent of the bunch, live and work in New York (or at least divide their time between there and another city); 12, or 19 percent, call Los Angeles home. (For comparison, in 2019, 51 percent of participants came from New York, and 11 came from L.A.)
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The 2022 Biennial also skews more international than other recent editions.
Sixteen artists, including Yto Barrada, Alfredo Jaar, and Duane Linklater, were born outside of the U.S. That accounts for a solid quarter of the participant list, a high mark last seen with the 2008 Biennial, in which more than a quarter of artists were foreign-born. That percentage decreased for each of the successive Biennials, dipping to 17 percent in 2019. 
Eleven of this edition’s artists live and work abroad, including three in Mexico (Mónica Arreola, Alejandro “Luperca” Morales, and Roberts) and two from Canada (Rebecca Belmore and Duane Linklater). 
“We wanted to make an exhibition that looks like what America really looks like,” Breslin told Artnet News in an interview, “which is a country of immigrants, a country of pressure along the border.”
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If you enter Michelle Stuart’s current New York solo show, “The Imprints of Time, 1969–2021,” expecting to see Land Art, you might feel confused. There is no documentation of large-scale sculptural interventions changing the face of the landscape—but make no mistake, many of these works involve the physical transformation of the earth.
For many years, the Los Angeles-born artist collected physical remnants of the earth during her travels around the world, bringing it back to the studio and painstakingly grinding piles of dirt and rocks onto thick sheets of paper to imbue it with natural earth tones. It’s a process that “reduces mountains to grains of sand,” art critic Lucy Lippard once wrote.
Now 89, Stuart has spent decades creating art that engages with natural environment, carefully archiving materials and breaking down eons of embodied time into orderly grids. Her literally groundbreaking career is set to be the subject of an upcoming documentary film, Michelle Stuart: Voyager, from director Karen Bellone and producer Karen S. Shapiro.
Ahead of the final days of her show at  Galerie Lelong, Artnet News spoke to Stuart about drawing inspiration from nature, working with the earth, and her lifelong determination to make art.
Michelle Stuart, Collection Table (for Rumpf) 1997. Photo courtesy of Galerie Lelong and Co., New York.
To help understand your work, with its unusual approach to material and subject matter, it might help to go back to the beginning. What was your art education at Los Angeles’s Chouinard Art Institute, today part of CalArts, like?
It was terrible. I only went there briefly, because I didn’t like it that much. It was a boys’ schools, really. Some of the teachers were fine with women, but some weren’t. One of them said to me, “I don’t know why women bother to go to art school. There aren’t any women artists anyway. They must know that.” Of course, I was already determined, but I never forgot it. Can you imagine an art teacher saying that?
The one experience at Chouinard that was a positive one was that Bernard Leach, an English ceramist, and Shoji Hamada, a Japanese potter, came for a talk. I was in a clay class, so I went, and it was really a revelatory exploration.
Hamada just sat on the ground with a pot and a wheel, and showed us how he made pots. He didn’t speak English, so Leach of course translated for him, about how in Japan and Korea it was alright if there was a mistake in art, because only God was perfect. I thought it was a beautiful sentiment, not in any religious sense, but in the sense of espousing chance as a gift to the artist. It encapsulated the idea of time. It was a really memorable experience for me.
Michelle Stuart, Creation Myth (2020). Photo ©Michelle Stuart, courtesy Galerie Lelong and Co., New York.
You mentioned that you were already determined to be an artist when you got to art school. When did you first know that was your life goal?
Very early. I was very fortunate in having parents who appreciated art. My father loved words and books and my mother loved art. When I started making art as a child, my mother would put it on the walls and say “this is really good.”
In high school, I took a class at night with a Hungarian draftsman, Francis de Erdely, at Jepson Art Institute. My mother drove me since I was too young to drive. He had classes in drawing that were very traditional, with corpulent models. It was classical, in-the-round depth drawing. He would take the pencil from you and do his idea for what the arm or the leg should be right over your drawing. It was very European. But I learned how to draw with him. Really, I learned how to see.
Michelle Stuart, Islas Encantas: Seymour Island Cycle (1981–82). Photo courtesy of Galerie Lelong and Co., New York.
It seems to me like your father’s work in mapping the landscape in preparation for installing water lines across California might have been an influence in the direction that your work ultimately took.
Well, yes and no. I was too young when he was doing that to really be influenced by that, but we traveled around California a lot. My father liked to show my mother and I the landscape, the desert, and the sea. And he gave me the gift of loving books. It takes a lot of different things to become an artist. Reading books and reading poetry, that’s part of the building structure of what you later feel when you see something.
How did you come to work as topographical draftsperson for the United States Army Corps of Engineers?
That happened because I needed a job. I got a job with an engineering and architectural firm as a draftsperson. I was good at it, and they were hired by the Army Corps of Engineers to map Korea, because the Korean War had started.
At that time, maps were translated from aerial photographs. But we had big aerial photos that were all over the wall, and we would make drawings with all the roads and where the buildings were situated. Once we inked them in India ink, then they were photographed. But I never saw the end product!
Michelle Stuart, El Florido (1978-79). Photo ©Michelle Stuart, courtesy Galerie Lelong and Co., New York.
Do you see any parallel between that work mapping the landscape and your work as an artist, literally translating the landscape onto paper you can hang on the wall?
I never thought about it actually. Everything you do influences your art. In a very obscure way, I ended up translating the surface of the earth. It’s a huge jump, but it’s not an impossible jump. But this is the first time I’ve ever explained what I did when I was drafting to anyone.
Well that’s my job as an art writer, to try and make connections, however obscure they might seem. But I’m curious then, what did give you the idea to use dirt, graphite, and other elements of the landscape for mark-making?
I can’t really say that one thing gave me the idea. Previously, I had been working in sculpture, and I started doing boxes of earth. I wanted to capture the earth. And at the same time, I was doing drawings of the surface of the moon. And then I took that and started thinking about the surface of the earth.
I used this heavier paper that I was actually familiar with from drafting. It’s muslin-backed, indefatigable paper. They don’t make it anymore, but it was it was made for mapmaking. I laid it on the surface of the earth and I started rubbing. I loved the way that it gave me itself. It embraced me as much as I embraced it. There was a kind of dialogue between the earth and me. That’s the only way I can put it.
After a couple of years, I went to McDowell Colony, where you could get away from New York City for a couple of months. They gave me a barn. I took all my paper up to this barn and I started putting the earth on top of the paper and smashing it in and rubbing it. It was not just the reflection of the rubbing of the earth. It was the indention of the earth, and the color of the earth.
Michelle Stuart working on one of her scrolls. Photo by Lorie Sebastian, courtesy of the artist.
Do you relate that work to the history of women’s labor and women’s work?
Are you reading Lucy [Lippard] now? [Laughs.] She does. I don’t, but that’s okay. I love Lucy. That’s her perception.
And is it true that the process would actually cause your hands to physically bleed?
That has, happened yes. Lucy said “masochistically”—but I certainly didn’t want that to happen. Some earth has so many hard edges, little pieces of quartz and things. I tried not to have that happen, but sometimes it did.
Michelle Stuart, Stone Alignments/Solstice Cairns (1978-79). Photo ©Michelle Stuart, courtesy Galerie Lelong and Co., New York.
What was your relationship to the Land Art movement when it was first becoming part of the art discourse? Was it something you consciously considered yourself to be part of? 
I wasn’t actively thinking about it, but of course you can’t escape knowing a little bit about different concepts that are going on.
I was invited to Oregon to do a solstice piece in 1978 [at the now-defunct Portland Center for the Visual Arts]. And I said, “Can I do a Land Art piece?” And they said yes, but they only had a pittance amount of money for the show. So I had to pay to fly back and forth, but they got me an assistant, and they found a man who wanted to get rid of his rocks. He had horses, and they were always falling over them.
We went to see this gentleman. He gave us this pickup truck and said “take all the rocks that you want.” It was the best exercise in the world. Picking up all these rocks, taking them to the site, and building it was a great adventure. We camped out there.
We had to figure out where the north south axis would be, and where the sun was going to come up and where it would set. And it worked beautifully. [The final piece, titled Stone Alignments/Solstice Cairns, is Stuart’s sole surviving earth work.]
The difference [from the larger Land Art movement] was that most of my works were of the moment. I didn’t do things that I wanted to last forever. People were building monumental earthworks and they bought they land so they would be there as long as possible. That was not in my mind. For me, these were transitory works, for those who wanted to go and participate in them.
Michelle Stuart, Niagara Gorge Path Relocated (1975). Photo by George MacDonald, ©Michelle Stuart, courtesy Galerie Lelong and Co., New York.
That was certainly the case with Niagara Gorge Path Relocated, one of your best-known earthworks, which you created in 1975 at Artpark in Lewiston, New York.
It was the first large piece that I did. It lasted about a month. It was all about time, land and time. I researched the area and found it had been the original site of Niagara Falls 12,000 years ago. So I reiterated the falls with one of my scrolls, but it was 460 feet long. The paper came in 30-foot increments and I had to sew all the segments together by hand.
But I have to admit, I had helpers. It’s the only time that I’ve ever done [rubbings] that I ever shared the experience. I was doing the piece up on top of the plateau, and these young people would come by and they said, “oh, what are you doing? Oh, we love that!” So I said “here, join the club!”
Putting the piece down was kind of hair-raising. But it was a lovely endeavor, and all the other artists in Artpark helped out—all of them guys, of course.
And the site there, it was an escarpment where you could see all the different layers of stratification in the earth. You’ve also done work with quarries. What appeals to you about the way that the landscape reveals layers of history just by looking at it? 
The landscape shows you things you never pay attention to. They’re all taken for granted. A 1,000 years can be a little strain of strata that goes through the earth. When you have a gorge or there’s been a big dig in a quarry, it opens up the world as it appeared before us, millions of years.
When I was a child, my father used to take me to Rancho La Brea, which is now La Brea Tar Pits. LACMA was not there. It was all tar pits where animals of the Pleistocene Age had gone to get water and been caught in the tar. There were extinct animals and plants, and it was revelatory to me as a child. They have a museum now with a big elephant, but when I was a child, they only had a concrete sculpture of a saber tooth tiger.
The incredible beauty of the stratification of the earth gives us is insight into our past. Different time produced different colors and different minerals. It’s a song of the past, really, when you think about it. Most people do not look at the landscape that way. But the real landscape is time. It’s a timescape.
La Brea Tar Pits, Los Angeles, California. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith/Buyenlarge/Getty Images.
One of the pieces in the show, Extinct, has all these plant specimens that you collected. I wonder when you’re looking at this history of the earth, are you looking ahead to the future with the fear of the consequences of human activity? 
Of course, I’m very interested in that. It’s hard to delineate those ideas. Just as its hard for artists to do political proselytizing without being incredibly boring, it’s hard to make art and say what you profoundly feel about what we’re doing to our planet. You have to do a kind of a dance between the poetry of life and the kind of disaster we’re heading for.
It’s very hard to be subtle about something like extinction. I try to be, because I want it to be art, but it’s hard to make it art and make it strong so that people feel it. It’s hard to make it say something, and still have it be art.
But those were not really extinct plants—there was a rose in there. It was a metaphor. It was taking plants that we love and saying, “there’s a possibility these will no longer exist.” But that was 1990 or ’91 when I made that work, and now it’s true. Now we’re really at the abyss.
Michelle Stuart, Extinct (1992). Photo ©Michelle Stuart, courtesy Galerie Lelong and Co., New York.
On a different note, that piece is also a great an example of the way that you kind of use an organizing grid, creating almost like an inventory that feels very scientific in its approach. Where does that come from?
I always liked science. I was very interested in it when I was in school. I half considered archaeology as a profession, but I was better at art and I was terrible at math. I always liked the structure of things. The grid gives me a beautiful structure. It’s there to hang chaos on. You can use to talk about time, because the breaking up of space is calendrical.
My seed drawings started as a calendar thing. I thought of their growth period. A seed is so positive. Embedded within it is everything it is, and it grows to repeat itself, so it lives forever. It’s kind of immutable.
I remember reading about an archeological dig in China where they found all those clay soldiers. The archaeologists on that dig unearthed a boat, and there had been some lotus seeds in the boat. They said to themselves, “I wonder if these seeds still are viable.” And in fact, they were. They were thousands years old, but a couple of them sprouted. And I thought, this is the most beautiful, positive thought. We can destroy everything. And yet buried somewhere, there is going to be the life force.
So I started doing those calendars, which I think are kind of positive views of our badness.
Michelle Stuart, Seed Calendar: One Month Five Days in Bali, Java and Sulewesi 1994). Photo courtesy of Galerie Lelong and Co., New York.
I want to note that you’ve collected these seeds and other natural materials from your travels around the world. What are some of the challenges of working this way?
Sometimes it’s impossible! I went to Hawaii, and they wouldn’t let me take anything. California doesn’t like it either. New York doesn’t give a shit. You can bring almost anything into New York. This city is not agricultural. I’ve brought stuff in from South America, from all over, but I don’t take it from anyplace where I would damage anything, and I don’t bring back any bugs. You have to be careful about that.
And how do you pack? Is your carry-on suitcase just full of dirt? 
I just put it in boxes. And I’ve been known to hide it!
“Michelle Stuart: The Imprints of Time, 1969–2021” is on view at Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th Street, New York, February 24–March 26, 2022.
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It sounds like a riddle: What kind of opera house has no stage, and what sort of library has no books?
The answer is the Haskell Free Library, which sits on the border between the United States and Canada. The site doubles as the set for a new film by former Turner Prize joint-winner Lawrence Abu Hamdan, which debuts this week at the Toronto Biennial of Art (TBA). 
The Victorian-era building, which hosts an opera house and a library, was originally constructed to provide education and cultural enrichment to the border communities located directly on the 45th parallel in between Rock Island, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont.
One half of the structure, including most of the opera seats, is located on U.S. land; the other half, which includes the library and the stage, is in Canada. (Now you understand the joke about it being the only library in the U.S. without books and the only opera house in the U.S. with no stage.)
Jeffrey Gibson, I AM YOUR RELATIVE, MOCA Toronto (2022). Co-commissioned by MOCA and the Toronto Biennial of Art. Photos Toni Hafkenschied.
What makes this library and opera house so resonant, according to artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan, is the way it illustrates how borders are in fact not lines, but rather densely layered legal and judicial spaces. Such questions about space, race, national identity, and land are at the heart of the entire edition of this biennial, which, after a year of pandemic-related delays, runs from March 26 through June 5. 
“​​What Water Knows, The Land Remembers,” curated by Candice Hopkins, Katie Lawson and Tairone Bastien, features work by more than 40 artists and includes formats ranging from workshops, guided walks, and artist talks to podcasts and storytelling sessions. 
A total of 23 projects across nine venues were commissioned specifically for the occasion. “We are a commissioning biennial and conceive of exhibitions and public/learning projects alongside each other,” Patrizia Libralato, TBA’s executive director and founder, told Artnet News. “We see ourselves as a convening organization, bringing partners together with a collaborative approach critical to all we do.”
One of those commissioned projects is Hamdan’s film, 45th Parallel. The work introduces viewers to the library, which has no entrance from Canada (there is, however, an emergency exit on the Canadian side of the building and patrons from Canada are permitted to enter the U.S. door without reporting to customs). The film also revisits a tragedy that took place against the backdrop of the library in 2010, when a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot an unarmed 15-year-old Mexican national across the border.
Judy Chicago in collaboration with Pyro Spectaculars by Souza, Diamonds in the Sky (2021). Fireworks performance, Belen, NM. © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Donald Woodman/ARS, New York
Hamdan is not alone in exploring local history and institutions in this edition of the biennial. Artist Judy Chicago is preparing Tribute to Toronto, a new site-specific performance on June 4. Visible from the shores of Lake Ontario, the work—part of her ongoing “Atmospheres” series—consists of non-toxic colored smoke released from a barge. It’s Chicago’s first-ever work on water.
“One of my goals is to offer viewers the opportunity to look intently at the glory of the natural environment,” Chicago told Artnet News, “one that is threatened with the destructive forces of climate change and human encroachment.”
The biennial is also presenting a number of research-intensive projects. The curators found themselves repeatedly returning to and sharing with partners a text by Mohawk artist Ange Loft, “Indigenous Context and Concepts for Toronto,” which the biennial commissioned for its 2019 edition. They also plan to distribute a new commission, a Black History Navigational Toolkit, by artist Camille Turner and writer Yaniya Lee. 
Camille Turner, Nave (2021–22). Video installation. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art.
Summing up the ethos of the biennial, curator Tairone Bastien said it “is unique in its commitment to unpack the complex historical context where the biennial takes place.”
All of TBA 2022’s events, programs, and exhibitions can be viewed here.
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The art world has as much to do with access as it does with art. So a big part of the artist Faith Ringgold’s retrospective at the New Museum in New York, a sweeping survey spanning almost six decades, is organized around the fact that she didn’t have a lot of inroads. Looking back, her practice even flourished in spite of it.
This is because Ringgold never lost sight of who she was making work for. Her pieces are “very much coming from a Black womanist perspective, as opposed to a reactionary viewpoint,” artist Tschabalala Self, who first saw Ringgold’s work as a child in Harlem, told Artnet News. “Her works strongly exist within this aesthetic of Black American storytelling, and for the edification of that community, not from a didactic place of making work or explaining Black life to a non-Black audience.”
Ringgold’s retrospective is the first major New York museum show of her work since 1998, when the New Museum also presented her work. Another show was held at the studio museum in 1984.
Faith Ringgold, Picasso’s Studio: The French Collection Part I, #7 (1991). © Faith Ringgold / ARS, NY and DACS, London, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 2022.
“The gaps between the first two retrospectives immediately gives you a sense of the reception and of the marginalization of her work,” Massimiliano Gioni, the current show’s co-curator, told Artnet News. But her art “always found new ways to exist in spite of the many complicated conditions she was in.” 
In the end, those complicated conditions are hard for anyone to ignore—even curators putting together a show about Ringgold’s life and work. In the years since her 1998 retrospective, Ringgold, now 91, was so alienated from the mainstream art world that she was forced to develop a practice that could exist and thrive outside it.
In her 1995 memoir, We Flew Over the Bridge, Ringgold reveals how, in the ‘70s, her career “started with a bang and ended with a whimper.” 
After launching her “American People” series in the ‘60s—hyper-realist paintings that zeroed in on the racial and gender strife characterizing Ringgold’s everyday life at a time when the art world was obsessed with work that was “cool, unemotional, uninvolved, and not ‘about’ anything,” as she wrote—she joined the stable at Spectrum Gallery on 57th Street, becoming the only Black artist represented there.
During her tenure, she pivoted to her “Black Light” series, a group of pieces that included agitprop-style texts and African-inspired portraits with even more overt Black Power messaging, to the point where she eliminated the use of white paint altogether. By 1970, she’d landed her second solo show at the gallery, still eager to see what the art world could ultimately do for her. 
By the end of the decade, she found her answer: not much. 
Faith Ringgold, Slave Rape #2: Run You Might Get Away (1972). © Faith Ringgold / ARS, NY and DACS, London, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 2022. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging; courtesy Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London.
Feeling disheartened, Ringgold forged ahead, finding new opportunities. But even now, as the art world turns its eyes onto her work, many audiences still don’t know that she’s much more than a painter. For one, she was also a prolific sculptor.
On top of her teaching career, she conducted lectures and put on performances at colleges and universities, producing doll-like soft sculptures as props. These life-sized, often heavily adorned works also provided Ringgold with a way of capturing a small piece of the world that she was able to call her own.
“She created a whole system of support for herself that was not the traditional gallery [system] in New York,” Gioni said.
Faith Ringgold, The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro (1975-89). © Faith Ringgold / ARS, NY and DACS, London, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 2022. Photo: Ron Amstutz; courtesy Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland.
Finding a Place Where You Belong
Growing up in Harlem in the 90s, Tschabalala Self knew about Ringgold, the children’s book author, but not about Ringgold, the artist. 
“Peripherally, I would see a lot of her work in the community—for example, if you go to a children’s bookstore,” Self said. “So with Tar Beach, I just automatically identified it with the landscape because it looked like my neighborhood.” (Tar Beach was the first book Ringgold wrote and illustrated. The children’s story tells the tale of a young girl yearning to explore the world beyond Harlem.)
Self, who has been so inspired by Ringgold’s life and art that she worked closely with Gioni to fundraise for the show, explained that Ringgold’s work, along with that of a number of other prominent Black artists, was woven into the tapestry of her neighborhood. The way it worked—and even still works—is that someone can have a strong, even critical presence in one community, while simultaneously being shunned by another. 
Faith Ringgold, Sonny’s Bridge (1986). © Faith Ringgold / ARS, NY and DACS, London, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 2022
“If you grew up in Harlem and went to the African American Day Parade every summer,” Self said, “you didn’t realize that, that’s a David Hammons flag, right? You’re just thinking, ‘Oh, that’s a cool Pan-African American flag.’ It’s just an ubiquitous symbol in the neighborhood.”
The storytelling that Ringgold began with Tar Beach continued in her now-famous painted story quilts—which, by and large, depict profound moments of her life. 
The quilt version of Tar Beach, dating to 1988, resonates with Self not only because it reminds her of her childhood, but also because of its fantastical sensibility. 
“I think that’s so important to talk about, the relationship between the fantastical and Black American identity,” Self said. “There’s so much about Black American life that is surreal, and not necessarily in a positive way or negative way. But it’s important to just bring that fantasy into that work.”
Faith Ringgold, Woman on a Bridge #1 of 5: Tar Beach (1988). © Faith Ringgold / ARS, NY and DACS, London, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 2022.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Meet Willia Marie Simone. She is a fictional character Ringgold created in the ‘90s for her “French Collection” series. Willia is an expatriate studying art in Paris. Willia is the Black figure who never had a chance to be a central character within Modern art’s depictions of French life.
Extending this fabulation into her next series, Ringgold formulates a story, set stateside, about Willia Marie Simone’s daughter; a narrative that is, according to Gioni, the story of “non-white America and all these counter myths of origin.” One piece features a Black, dreadlocked Statue of Liberty.
In her 20s and 30s, Ringgold assumed the art world would help get her work the audience it deserved. From her “American People” series, to her highly political “Black Light” series, and then through to her performances, sculptures, and story quilts, Ringgold never lost sight of her goal to be honest about the racism and sexism she came up against constantly. And for her efforts, she ended up finding an audience all on her own.  
Faith Ringgold, American People Series #15: Hide Little Children (1966). © Faith Ringgold / ARS, NY and DACS, London, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 2022. Photo: Todd-White Art Photography, London; courtesy Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London.
In the end, her work reflects that trajectory. It’s easy to see now how Ringgold ultimately helped usher in an environment for contemporary artists such as Self, an environment that never existed for many of Ringgold’s peers. 
But Self is also realistic about the impact Ringgold’s work will have today. While we’re in the midst of a cultural shift around gender and race, one that reflects ideals that artist-activists like Ringgold fought long and hard for, there’s still a lot more work to do.
“With any kind of movement, when you’re trying to change the culture, it’s not a matter of completely solving the issue,” Self said. “It is about pushing it one step forward, and then hoping that the next group of people are going to be able to push it again.”
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