Critical Essay: American People: Die (1967) by Faith Ringgold

American People #20: Die by Faith Ringgold copyright Faith Ringgold.

 This was a discussion of Die I posted on my blog Soul Pictures: Black Feminist Generations
http://www.mjsoulpictures.blogspot.com in 2009 when Die was exhibited at the Art Galleries of Ontario.  There was talk then of them buying the painting, which makes it all the more wonderful that The Museum of Modern Art finally has, and is already showing it prominently as part of their collection from the 1960s.

Two really wonderful articles help to provide background for this extraordinary accomplishment, the first of these is in Art News today:

http://www.artnews.com/2016/07/18/moma-acquires-and-hangs-a-major-early-faith-ringgold/

The second of these is by Anne Monahan and appears in NKA and is called "Faith RInggold's Die: The Riot and Its Reception. (See subsequent post).

My words concerning the Ontario exhibition and other master works of the American People Series are as follows. Including references to American People #18 and #19--The Flag is Bleeding and U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Advent of Black Power, also dating from 1967.

Faith's mural Die is featured in an exhibition at the Art Galleries of Ontario, which has a post on the web at http://www.ago.net/contemporary-collection-1960s-freedom-and-conflict.

I remember very clearly and very distinctly when Faith painted this diptych oil on canvas somewhat imaginative depiction of the "race riots" that had begun to plague the United States landscape every summer like clockwork.  I was fifteen and had just returned from a summer in Europe with my grandmother (MJ) and my sister Barbara.  I came home to find mother hard at work still on two of her three murals for her first one man show at the Spectrum Gallery scheduled for the fall.  

These riots were almost always in what we then called "black ghettos," and most participants were either black people who lived in the community, or white officers policing the black community, or white press attempting (usually unsuccessfully) to report on the action.  Faith's Die (1967) has grown even more fascinating to me over the years because I am more struck by the tension between her depiction, which portrays both whites and blacks bleeding and fleeing, males and females engaged in a free-for-all reminiscent of Picasso's Gernica (which we had been to visit so many times at the Museum of Modern Art when I was a child) whereas the actual riots were largely black men breaking into stores, battling the police who had guns with rocks or other objects, chaotic affairs.   

So the battle Faith's mural portrays is a conceptual one, revealing the undercurrents of what was really at stake in the riots of the 60s, which was black against white conflict mostly in urban cities.  Blacks (mostly males I believe) were registering their dissatisfaction with the restrictions of ghetto life, the lack of genuine opportunities for advancement and prosperity, and their realization that despite the absense of the obvious signs of Jim Crow segregation and restriction in the cities, the white power structure was still pulling the strings and keeping them in check. 

From this point on (in the late 60s), by the way, the numbers of black males incarcerated begun to increase exponentially even as other kinds of opportunities began to open up for black men who were educated and had bourgeois aspirations.  Up until today where we find ourselves with a black president, a black secretary of state, a black governor of New York, and it was a white Governor Rockefeller who caused the massacre at Attica and engineered the discriminatory incarceration practices (see my first book Black Macho [1979], which was all about Black Power, as well as subsequent editions and publications).

Aside from Die, there was also The Flag is Bleeding, which was entirely finished I believe, and U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Advent of Black Power, which immediately became my favorite painting in the world. I was only fifteen so my thinking about it wasn't particularly deep. It was for the simple reason that it included 100 faces in a grid of ten faces by ten faces, with ten black faces in diagonal order representing their status as 10% of the population of the United States and all the rest of the faces were white.

What really held my attention as she painted this painting was the idea, which she shared with me, that the trick of it would be to make each of the faces somewhat distinct from every other and yet obviously more alike than different apart from the difference of skin color. This notion of difference was enthralling to me. Even more enthralling was that every day when I got up and looked at the painting, I would notice that one or more of the faces would have changed owing to the manner in which Faith was building up layer upon layer of paint in construction of these images. Each and every face was entirely different from every other ever so slightly but how? I would scan the surface looking for the slight differences of appearance, and how it was that I knew one face from the other.  I never grew tired of this exercise.

These many years later, I have learned of the fascinating work psychologists have done on the human memory for faces as well as the scientific verification we now have that each and every face, with its complex structure of muscles and tendons and emotions, is completely unique and goes much deeper than differences of skin tone or hair texture or gender. It is possible to have a stroke and have one's memory for faces knocked out, leaving other kinds of memory intact. Apparently the loss of the ability to distinguish one face from another and to recognize familiar faces is devastating.

The 60s were a complicated period about which there is a great deal more to say.  It is great to see that museums in Canada are taking on the political art of the 60s since our own museums in the United States have been largely unwilling to come to terms with the masterpieces of American political art of the 60s.  Of course, a lot of that art would be African American.  Could that have something to do with their reluctance?  I hope not.

Photo-Essay: Change: The 1960s

Faith in various photos of her body throughout the 1960s as she continues to gain weight while married to Burdette.

Photo Essay: Aunt Helen Died at 51 in 1962

This is a picture of the side of the big house at Camp Craigmeade and this lovely lady is one of the campers, not me but somebody who didn't mind having her picture taken. I don't know why we have her picture or who she might be but suffice it to say that when I was at Camp Craigmeade I knew who everybody was.

Just today realized that the summer Aunt Helen died at camp was in 1962. Barbara and I went to Camp Craigmeade for the last time in 1962, also the first summer of Faith and Burdette's marriage. Didn't know it would be the last year but it makes sense now that without Aunt Helen's determination to make it work, the camp could not survive. There were many kids there who went to the school she ran. I was ten and Barbara was nine. Yet another thing was about to change forever subsequent to our new life with Dad (Burdette).

Her name was Helen McIntosh Meade, as I have learned from her obituary in the New York Times (August 15, 1962) as unearthed by my sister Barbara today. The headline reads "Mrs. N.T. Meade, 51, Led Private School." She was the owner of Camp Craigmeade, which was described as "an interracial camp" in Roxbury, New York. It says she died of a heart attack on a Saturday, although nothing about her illness while at camp. The biggest surprise was that she was only 51 when she died when I thought her to be much older. She was the wife of Nathaniel T. Meade, who was also a founder of their school the Little Brown School House in 1934 in the Bronx at 1177 Hoe Avenue. I also thought the other two Aunties, who were perhaps relatives of hers, were much older too but they too were probably at most in their early 60s. Afterall, the hygenic conditions at the camp--no running water, no hot water, no heat, no plumbing to speak of and outhouses, no paved roads--were certainly challenging for anybody not ambulatory and strong.

I had always suspected that Aunt Helen was highly educated and progressive and this is confirmed by the obituary, something about the way she wore her hair, something about the way she talked that I could already see even though I was only ten. She had graduated from New York Teachers Training College in New York in New York in 1931, and later received her B.S. and M.A. degrees from Teacher's College at Columbia University. After teaching briefly in the public school system, she founded her own school and operated summer camps for many years. She was national recording secretary of the National Council of Negro Women and the President of its Manhattan Chapter. Meade was also a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She was survived by her husband, Nathaniel, her stepmother and her brother Eugene E. McIntosh, Jr. I am perfectly thrilled by this discovery.

She gave me one natural fit about my bedwetting which must have been particularly bad in that last year, I am not sure why.  

Photo Collection: Marion, My Counselor 1960s

MarionCamp, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

This lovely lady was my first counselor at camp and I adored her. She was sweet, gentle and pretty.

Photo-Essay: Aunt Helen 1960s

Aunt Helen, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

This is Aunt Helen in the white shorts (always wore white shorts) with the other two aunties who ran the camp. They did the cooking. Back in the 50s. We first went to Camp Craigmeade, an all black camp in the Catskills between 1956 and 1958, and we went there another four summers until one summer Aunt Helen died when we were in residence, which was the end of the camp. The location was a mountain site about a mile outside of Roxbury, New York and I have always meant to return there just to see if the outhouses and everything is still as I remember it. The story of who these black people came to own this camp is of interest to me as well. Were we not welcome at white camps? I don't know. I do know that Aunt Helen Meade was a maverick in everything she did, unlike any person I've ever met. Behind them stands the stone wall where we often gathered at the camp, or walked along on top of it. Childhood was heaven indeed.

Photo Essay: Michele in Anything Goes 1968

Michele in Anything Goes, Spring 1968

This is before I got an Afro, which means I was 16, maybe still dating Stanley Nelson, my boyfriend.  I can hardly recall.  I remember being that girl doing that routine but what else was going on in my life is fuzzy.  Anything Goes was a New Lincoln musical production and great fun in the doing.
The summer before in 1967 Barbara and I had gone to Europe with MJ for two whole months while Mom Faith concentrated on producing her great murals DIE, THE FLAG IS BLEEDING and THE UNITED STATES POSTAGE STAMP TO COMMEMORATE BLACK POWER.  During the day she painted at the Spectrum gallery on 57th Street with her friend Jeannine Petite, and in the evenings she avoided her own apartment where Dad was and went instead to MJ's smaller, less demanding apartment.  Dad was effectively abandoned for the summer and eventually wondered away to establish his new apartment in 409.  Faith tells me and tells everyone that this was the first time ever in her adult life that she had ever been entirely on her own, entirely alone and free to do whatever she wished without having to consider the wants and needs of her family.  She was 37 years old and it had been a very long wait.

The sacrifice she made was that at the end of the summer, Dad and her were no longer living together.  After the fall out from two month trip to Europe (to Paris, Rome, London, Florence and perhaps Nice) with MJ the summer of 1967, we were considered incapable of taking trips with adults. We had been rude with MJ, a problem we had never had before. I was consumed with guilt at the time because as I recall my one abiding thought in every beautiful European city we visited was how to get away from MJ so that I could have a cigarette. Barbara and I were both mildly addicted to cigarettes at this point. 

Both of our parents smoked at home.  Unfortunately, many of the kids at New Lincoln smoked. Cigarettes were easily procured from other students. We had a student lounge in which the major activity other than playing cards, was smoking and we had a little hangout down the street where the smoke was so thick you could cut it with a knife. 

The kids at New Lincoln were very worldly and sophisticated, disrespectful and disdainful of both religion and authority, terrifyingly so in fact, and I am afraid it had a negative impact on my regard for MJ's more homespun style of childrearing and instruction.  It was she who had given me my initial training in religion, deportment, manners, morality and ethics. I had always taken her very seriously, loved her food, her cooking, her clothes, everything about her.  When we moved away from her house on Edgecombe Avenue to the Bronx, I had even tried to run away to go live with her, for which I got the only whipping that I can clearly remember. 

We had only great times at MJ's house and even once we had gone to live in the Bronx or in 345, weekends, sick days and holidays were all spent with MJ.  We were always welcome at her house.  I often accompanied her wherever she needed or wanted to go.  My relationship with her had always been easy, completely loving and warm.  At MJ's house there was no housework and cooking, no holding back on the childcentered quality of the environment she provided. You were woken up early in the morning with a day of fun planned for you and then it was early to bed.  Unlike my Mom, MJ could somehow easily manage this, all her housework, the cooking and her sewing too.  Mixed in as well were delightful surprises of entertainments you had not imagined, foods you loved to eat but rarely saw in the Bronx and just the greatest fun you could possibly imagine.  

Sometimes when it was warm, it was still light when we were put to bed. I know I would not have gone to bed so early for my Mom and Dad but for MJ, you did anything she wanted. So it was all the more surprising and unacceptible that we were starting to laugh behind MJ's back and keep secrets from her, sneaking away to grab cigarettes in the bathroom down the hall (in Europe we stayed all three of us in a single room in a pensione with a bathroom down the hall. Kids are not good at sneaking but we had to sneak to buy the cigarettes, sneak to smoke them, and sneak to keep them hidden from her finding them.  It must have been truly terrible for her. All the time, i assumed she knew we were smoking although she never accused us of it.  Years later my Mom told me that she never said we were smoking, only that we had misbehaved.  I'll never know whether she knew or whether she didn't know that smoking was at the root of the problem.

So Barbara and I both spent the summer of 1968 in an arts program in Harlem at Music and Art, which was then located on the City College of New York campus. Given my superior training and maturity, I was soon drafted by the teacher as her demonstration assistant. Mom was chasing the Art World after the opening of her first one-woman show at the Spectrum Gallery in the fall of 1967, to which we invited all our friends from New Lincoln.  We drank champagne and danced as the adults made a circle around us.