The Significance of Faith Ringgold at the Serpentine Gallery, London

… With the exception of New York, London has been the epicenter of the artworld in the postwar period. From abstract expressionism to pop art, minimalism to conceptualism, performance to neo-expressionism and so forth, all roads have led to London. European artists have without doubt been a constant presence in the programmes of London’s major public galleries. Equally, in the postwar period, these major publicly funded galleries have, collectively, carried a torch, for American art. Or to be more precise, the work of white American artists. From Tate Gallery’s numerous American art surveys, dating from the mid 1940s through to 1990s, to the Whitechapel Gallery’s premier of Jackson Pollock’s paintings in 1958, or the ‘controversy’ surrounding the purchase of Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII in 1973, London’s deference to 20^th century American art has been racially unequivocal. From Pollock to Rothko, Newman to Johns. By comparison, African American artists born within striking distance of Ringgold (who was born in 1930), such as Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, and Charles White, have all been forsaken by London. These and many other artists have been conspicuous by their absence. The practice of excluding senior African American artists from broader definitions of American art certainly originated in the US. However, from the postwar period, London’s major public galleries ventured little to counter this pathology. In 2013, Ringgold was awarded (along with Cindy Sherman) an honorary doctorate by the Royal College of Art. The press release explained “Faith’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries world-wide and is included in many eminent private and public art collections."[1] At the time, no major London institution had neither exhibited nor collected Ringgold’s art. Ringgold is now 88 and had previously exhibited outside the United States in a small number of group exhibitions in France, Spain and Egypt.[2] In Britain, three of Ringgold’s works from the late 1960s and early 1970s were  included in Tate Modern’s exhibition Soul of a Nation Art in the Age of Black Power in 2017.  One of these was the striking painting American People Series #20: Die 1967. 

Since the early 2000s, there has been a notable increase in solo exhibitions by African American artist in London’s public galleries. These exhibitions have characteristically focused on ever younger practitioners such as Kerry James Marshall, Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, Ellen Gallagher, Rashid Johnson and Sondra Perry. Although tempting to consider Ringgold’s retrospective as part of this continuum, it represents a distinct break. Equally, it also highlights the lasting and damaging exclusion of senior African American artists from London’s most prestigious and influential public galleries. Martin Puryear’s solo exhibition at BALTIC: Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead in 2003  (subsequently shown at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin in 2005)  and Senga Nengudi’s recent mini-retrospective at the Henry Moore institute, in 2018 (and toured to Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh) though important, are perhaps too disparate to be considered as forming an alternative level of engagement with African American art from outside of London…

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