Faith Ringgold mini-retrospective at Jack Shainman Gallery showcases her range

The Jack Shainman Gallery in Manhattan is presenting “Faith Ringgold,” a mini-retrospective and the gallery’s first show with the artist’s estate. Ringgold, who died in 2024, is represented across a range of media that make her work immediately recognizable. The exhibition includes oil paintings, gouaches, figurines and unstretched textile works inspired by Tibetan thangkas, as well as the artist’s well-known “story quilts.” Among the works on view is the 2004 quilted painting “Mama Can Sing, Papa Can Blow #2: Come On Dance With Me,” and several iterations of what Ringgold called her “Slave Rape” series.

The show also features smaller, striking pieces such as a gouache reading “You don’t know me but we all know you” and a 1960s painting of a coven of ominous white men. Reviewing the work, the show highlights Ringgold’s distinctive palette of saturated colors, especially reds, and stylized drawings that sit between Op Art and textile pattern, Pop Art and Expressionism, caricature and archetype.

The exhibition notes a philosophical consistency across these forms: an embrace of the full scope of the Black American experience and a conviction in the transformative, synthesizing power of art. The nearly seven-foot story quilt “Mama Can Sing, Papa Can Blow #2” is described in detail: a broad floral border and sewn-over edges make it unmistakably a quilt, but much of its surface is canvas and the figures are rendered in acrylic, so it reads as a painting as well.

Key Topics

Culture, Faith Ringgold, Manhattan, Jack Shainman Gallery, Story Quilts, Slave Rape Series