Faith Ringgold @ Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC

Faith Ringgold

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

November 14, 2025 – January 24, 2026

Jack Shainman Gallery presents Faith Ringgold, its inaugural exhibition dedicated to the trailblazing American artist, author, educator and activist. Spanning Ringgold’s extraordinary career, the exhibition foregrounds her groundbreaking and multifaceted practice in textiles—from her earliest ‘tankas’ to her iconic story quilt paintings—alongside pivotal early paintings, sculptures and rarely seen works on paper.

Restlessly creative and formally ambitious, Faith Ringgold explored the expressive potential of diverse media to create an incisive narrative about the historical sacrifices and achievements of Black Americans. Her practice emerged from the political consciousness and activism she developed during the 1960s and 1970s in Harlem, New York. Ringgold’s early paintings and works on paper from this period combine her unique and graphic approach to figuration with a bold and innovative approach to constructing space, which she would continue to explore throughout her life. Through her desire to overcome the largely white, art historical tradition, Faith Ringgold sought out forms more suitable to the exploration of gender and racial identity that she so urgently pursued, leading her to travel abroad in the 1970s, first to Europe and then to Africa.

Faith Ringgold’s experimentation with textiles began with what she referred to as ‘tankas.’ Inspired by the religious and spiritually significant Tibetan thangkas she first encountered when visiting the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Ringgold’s version manifested as paintings on unstretched canvas adorned with sewn fabric borders. It was the potential of these objects to explore the intersection of the craft and fashion traditions she inherited from her family with the history and techniques of European painting that inspired Faith Ringgold and formally initiated her investigation into the medium that would become an integral part of her practice. They additionally provided the flexibility to make art that could be easily transported around the world for exhibition, allowing her to circumvent some of the many practical and economic barriers regularly faced by women artists of her time.

Ringgold’s first tankas, the Feminist Series (1972), feature lush and vividly colored forest scenes paired with hand-painted quotations by Black female abolitionists and Civil Rights leaders. The format inspired her to create Political Landscapes and Love Poems, two series of works on paper from the same year that were odes to her experiences utilizing her own words. These were followed by the Slave Rape Series (1973), in which Faith Ringgold used the likenesses of herself and her daughters to embody the experiences of enslaved women—an act of both identification and reclamation. 

Pushing the tankas into an increasingly abstract direction, Faith Ringgold developed the Window of the Wedding (1974) series, a collaboration with her mother Willi Posey. Inspired by Kuba textiles, these abstract compositions were conceived as hanging prayer rugs intended to bring happiness and protection to married couples. Perhaps Ringgold’s most formally daring tanka works—a series of paintings with raffia fringe titled California Dah—were made in response to her mother’s passing, attempting to bridge the gap between the earthly and the afterlife.

Her experiments with textiles soon extended beyond the two-dimensional plane into painted soft sculptures and performance masks, works that merged her visual and performative sensibilities. Drawing from African sculptural traditions and her own background in theater and education, these works transformed fabric into a medium for storytelling and political expression. The Atlanta Children (1981) soft sculptures, created in response to the murders of twenty-eight Black children in Atlanta, exemplify this shift. Combining sewn and painted fabric, these haunting figures memorialize the victims while confronting the violence of systemic racism—effectively turning textile into a medium of mourning, resistance and care.

Faith Ringgold’s later development of the story quilt in the 1980s both allowed her to work at successively larger scales and to connect with a global lineage of feminine creativity. Regularly combining her autobiography with scenes and episodes from the collective history of Black life in America, the story quilts are disarmingly intimate yet historically grand. The malleability of the form gave her the freedom to move between abstract and experimental series—such as the Politically Correct Sheets and Love Letters that she made in 1987—and more narratively grounded and figuratively descriptive ones, such as the Jazz Stories quilts made between 2004-2007. 

In Politically Correct Sheets and Love Letters, Faith Ringgold melded the printmaking plates she created at Robert Blackburn’s legendary printshop with impressionistic segments of quilting surrounding it, sharply contrasting the graphic nature of the former with the painterly expressivity of the latter. The later Jazz Stories quilts, by contrast, saw Faith Ringgold draw upon her lifelong love of the genre while also centering female performers. By inverting the gendered hierarchies that historically privileged men, Ringgold proposed a vision of justice that would resonate beyond the arts.

Faith Ringgold returned to the history of slavery later in her career with the Coming to Jones Road (1999-2010) series, which recounted the imagined journey of enslaved people traveling north along the Underground Railroad. The title references Ringgold’s own move to a predominantly white suburb in New Jersey and the racial prejudice she experienced while living there at the turn of the 21st century. This fusing of personal and historically derived narratives challenged the conception of the Underground Railroad as being a linear story towards freedom and underscored the ongoing obstacles that persist at the end of a journey and alongside a new beginning.  

“The significance of Faith Ringgold’s life continues to be felt and understood in new, urgent and relevant ways, from pedagogy to artistry, from the personal to the political," said Jack Shainman. “Just as she fought tirelessly against the prevailing sentiments of racial and gendered exclusion of both her time and our own, so too did her inimitable work in textiles provide an example of how life and art—so often presumed to be separate—are in fact deeply and fundamentally intertwined. This exhibition marks the beginning of our commitment to furthering the legacy of one of this country’s most important and vital artists.”

Artist Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold (1930-2024) is recognized as one of the most significant cultural figures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whose impact and influence can be seen throughout the worlds of art and activism today. Over more than six decades, Ringgold distinguished herself as an artist, author, educator and organizer, as she understood the necessity of addressing the politics of race and gender in America in more ways than one. Restlessly creative and formally ambitious, Ringgold worked in a variety of media—from quilts and paintings to performances and children’s books—to create an incisive narrative about the historical sacrifices and achievements of Black Americans.

In 2022, Faith Ringgold was the subject of a major retrospective, Faith Ringgold: American People, which opened at the New Museum, New York, before then traveling to the de Young Museum, San Francisco and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In 2019, Serpentine Galleries, London opened Faith Ringgold, which then travelled to both the Bildmuseet Umeå, Sweden and Glenstone Museum, Potomac. From 2010 to 2013, American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold’s Paintings of the 1960s opened at the Neuberger Museum of Art, New York and traveled to the Perez Art Museum, Miami, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.

Faith Ringgold is included in numerous public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery, Washington, DC; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC; Neuberger Museum of Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Public Art for Public Schools, New York; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri; Studio Museum, Harlem, New York and The High Museum, Atlanta.

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

46 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10013

jackshainman.com

Bienvenue: African American Artists in France @ Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York

Bienvenue: African American Artists in France 

Michael Rosenfeld, New York

Through July 25, 2025

“There is a breadth, a generosity, an obsolete cosmopolitanism about her [France's] recognition of the fine arts, which bars no nationality, no race, no school, or variation of artistic method. All she asks is that the art shall be true, in other words that it shall set forth life.”—Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1908 [1]

“Life in Paris offers me the anonymity and objectivity to release long-stored memories of sorrow, and the beauty of the difficult effort to release and orchestrate in form and color a personal design. Being in France gives time for reflection. One never leaves home if one was never there.”—Beauford Delaney, 1966 [2]

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presents Bienvenue: African American Artists in France, a historical survey of seventeen Black American artists who lived and worked in France from the late nineteenth century through the present. Complementing the landmark exhibition Paris Noir: Artistic circulations and anti-colonial resistance, 1950–2000, on view at the Centre Pompidou through June 30th, Bienvenue offers an expanded look into the presence of Black American artists in France, many of whom were seeking respite from the systemic racism that limited their opportunities for education and the recognition of their work in the United States. Where Paris Noir encompasses artists of the larger African diaspora working in the second half of the twentieth century, Bienvenue: African American Artists in France focuses specifically on American artists, and spans nearly eight decades in its chronological scope, beginning with a 1912 painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937) and ending with a 1989 sculpture by Barbara Chase-Riboud (b.1934).

Bienvenue: African American Artists in France features works by Richmond Barthé (1901–1989), Barbara Chase-Riboud (b.1934), Ed Clark (1926–2019), Robert Colescott (1925–2009), Harold Cousins (1916–1992), Beauford Delaney (1901–1979), Herbert Gentry (1919–2003), Sam Gilliam (1933–2022), Palmer Hayden (1890–1973), Richard Hunt (1935–2023) William H. Johnson (1901–1970), Augusta Savage (1892–1962), William Edouard Scott (1884–1964), Albert Alexander Smith (1896–1940), Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937), Bob Thompson (1937–1966) and Hale Woodruff (1900–1980).

Widely regarded as the patriarch of Black American artists, Henry Ossawa Tanner remains a foremost painter of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the first Black American artist to achieve international fame. His relocation from Philadelphia to Paris in 1891 set a precedent that would inspire future generations of Black American artists to train, reside, or sojourn in France, including Harlem Renaissance master William Edouard Scott, who studied under Tanner from 1910–13. Likewise, Palmer Hayden, Augusta Savage, and Hale Woodruff each sought an audience with the elder master during their time in France in the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to invaluable advice on navigating the mores of French society, Tanner also provided guidance on painting techniques and openly shared his understanding of art. In a 1970 issue of The Crisis, Hale Woodruff recalled his formative encounter with Tanner in 1928. Traveling to the small town in Picardy where Tanner lived in semi-retirement, Woodruff introduced himself to “a remarkable man of profound intelligence and scholarship,” who welcomed the young artist into his home. Upon asking who had most inspired him in the Parisian museums, Woodruff recalled Tanner’s nomination of Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne as the most important painters of the modern age, elaborating:

“Remember that light can be many things: light for illuminating an object or for creating a mood; for purposes of dramatization as in a theatrical production. For myself, I see light chiefly as a means of achieving a luminosity, a luminosity not consisting of various light-colors but luminosity within a limited color range, say, a blue or blue-green. There should be a glow which indeed consumes the theme or subject. Still, a light-glow which rises and falls in intensity as it moves through the painting. It isn’t simple to put into words.”[3]

Though the country was not free of racism, France generally afforded Black artists and intellectuals greater respect and more opportunities than the United States during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such was the environment that prompted James Baldwin to make Paris his home in 1948, and he spent the ensuing years encouraging his good friend Beauford Delaney to join him. Delaney eventually agreed, moving from his Greene Street loft in Greenwich Village to Montparnasse in 1953. Delaney would remain in the vicinity of Paris for the remainder of his life, composing a singular body of gestural, chromatically nuanced abstractions and a celebrated series of portraits that reflect the creative and spiritual inspiration he felt in the European capital. “I left New York for Paris in 1953, and I have painted with greater freedom ever since,” Delaney wrote some ten years after leaving the United States. “I tried to paint light, different kinds of light, and my painting has been associated with ‘abstraction.’ But there are no precise limits for me between ‘abstract’ and ‘figurative’ paintings and I have always continued to paint portraits of friends.”[4] Beauford Delaney is a particularly strong presence in Paris Noir, which features twelve paintings by the artist, eight of which are on loan from Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.

While Paris has always been a cultural hub for creatives and intellectuals, many artists featured in Bienvenue traveled to the countryside or coast to paint, following the tradition of the Impressionist and modernist masters that inspired them. The exhibition offers key examples of this tradition, including maritime paintings by Palmer Hayden and a coastal scene by Tanner executed along the coast of Brittany; a seminal painting by William H. Johnson depicting the idyllic coastal town of Cagnes-Sur-Mer; a landscape portraying the island of Port-Cros off the French Riviera by Delaney; and a scene of the Eure river by Woodruff executed in Chartres.

The cosmopolitan hub of Paris was a natural attraction for Black American artists, who found the city’s architecture, social spaces, and creative circles to be rich sources of inspiration. Several works in the exhibition feature distinctly Parisian subjects, including Richmond Barthé’s iconic sculpture of Senegalese cabaret dancer Feral Benga; William Edouard Scott’s transcendent portrayal of Notre Dame; and a classic rendition of the Pont Neuf by Hale Woodruff. Parisian nightlife is likewise a recurring theme of the exhibition; in addition to Barthé’s bronze portrait of Benga, drawings by Robert Colescott and Albert Alexander Smith depicting cabaret performances are also on view.

Opportunities for education and art training were another primary draw for many artists, particularly in the postwar era. The exhibition features two abstract paintings by Ed Clark, who enrolled at L'académie de la Grande Chaumière in 1952; major sculptures by Harold Cousins, who studied at Ossip Zadkine’s studio in 1949; and a quintessential abstract painting by Herbert Gentry, who likewise studied under Zadkine and at L'académie de la Grande Chaumière in the late 1940s. Four paintings by Bob Thompson are also on view; executed during his first trip to Europe in 1961–62, these works testify to the hours Thompson spent at the Louvre and Paris’ many other museums, soaking up the compositional devices of the Old Masters and translating them into thoroughly contemporary paintings using his own unique expressionist voice.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is recognized for modern and contemporary art. Since its founding in 1989, the gallery has been committed to expanding the canon of American art by championing artists who have made vital contributions to surrealism, social realism, abstract expressionism, figurative expressionism, and geometric abstraction. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s dedication to presenting the work of nineteenth and twentieth century Black American masters is as longstanding as the gallery itself; in addition to dozens of solo exhibitions focused on Black American artists, the gallery organized the renowned annual exhibition series African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks from 1993–2003.

Notes:

[1] Henry Ossawa Tanner quoted in Dewey F. Mosby, Across continents and cultures: The Art and Life of Henry Ossawa Tanner (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1995), 7–8

[2] Beauford Delaney quoted in John Ashbery, “American Sanctuary in Paris,” ARTnews Annual vol. 31 (1966): 146

[3] Tanner quoted in Hale Woodruff, “My Meeting with Henry O. Tanner,” The Crisis (June 1970), reprinted in Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945-1965, exh. cat. (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1996), 11

[4] Beauford Delaney, artist statement, “Beauford Delaney - Career as a Creative Artist,” c.1963, Beauford Delaney collection, Sc MG 59, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library, New York, NY

MICHAEL ROSENFELD GALLERY

100 Eleventh Avenue @ 19th, New York, NY, 10011

www.michaelrosenfeldart.com

Bienvenue: African American Artists in France 

Michael Rosenfeld, New York, May 10 – July 25, 2025

Related Posts:

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 

Grey Art Museum, New York University, March 2 - July 20, 2024

Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964 - 1980

Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, April 5 - July 2, 2006

Amy Sherald: American Sublime @ Whitney Museum of American Art, New York - A Major Exhibition

Amy Sherald 

American Sublime

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

April 9 – August 10, 2025

Amy Sherald 

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, 2018 

Oil on linen, 72 1/8 × 60 1/8 × 2 3/4 in. (183.1 × 152.7 × 7 cm) 

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

The National Portrait Gallery is grateful to the following lead

donors for their support of the Obama portraits:

Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg; 

Judith Kern and Kent Whealy; 

Tommie L. Pegues and Donald A. Capoccia. 

Courtesy of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery

Amy Sherald 

Breonna Taylor, 2020 

Oil on linen, 54 × 43 × 2 1/2 in. 

The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, 

Museum, purchase made possible by a grant from the

Ford Foundation; and the Smithsonian National

Museum of African American History and Culture, 

purchase made possible by a gift from Kate Capshaw 

© Amy Sherald. Photograph by Joseph Hyde

The Whitney Museum of American Art presents Amy Sherald: American Sublime, the artist’s debut solo exhibition at a New York museum and the most comprehensive showing of her work. American Sublime considers Amy Sherald’s powerful impact on contemporary art and culture, bringing together almost fifty paintings spanning her career from 2007 to the present. This exhibition positions Amy Sherald within the art historical tradition of American realism and figuration. In her paintings, she privileges Black Americans as her subjects, depicting everyday people and foregrounding a population often unseen or underrepresented in art history. The exhibition features early works, never or rarely seen by the public, and new work created specifically for the exhibition, along with iconic portraits of First Lady Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor—two of the most recognizable and significant paintings made by an American artist in recent years.

Amy Sherald places her work within the lineage of American realism and portraiture, alongside artists like Robert Henri, Edward Hopper, Alice Neel, and Andrew Wyeth—all represented in the Whitney Museum’s collection. The early American realists sought to capture the ethos of American places and people. However, there is an evident absence of Black Americans in theserepresentations. Deeply committed to expanding notions of American identity, Sherald’s compositions center her subjects, inviting viewers to meet them eye to eye and empathetically step into their imagined worlds. Employing props and iconography—a tractor, a beach ball, the American flag, a toy pony, or a teacup—the artist crafts universally relatable narratives, illuminating her subjects’ idiosyncrasies and their unique life experiences. By including symbols that resonate with common ideas of American identity and history, these portraits offer a more complete view of the complexity of twenty-first-century American life. The resulting body of work attests to the multiple facets of American identity, reinforcing Sherald’s profound belief that “images can change the world.”

Amy Sherald 

If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It, 2019

Oil on linen, 130 × 108 × 2 1/2 in. (330.2 × 274.3 × 6.4 cm)

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2020.148 

purchase with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee, 

Sascha S. Bauer, Jack Cayre, Nancy Carrington Crown, 

Nancy Poses, Laura Rapp, and Elizabeth Redleaf

© Amy Sherald. Photograph by Joseph Hyde

Amy Sherald 

What's precious inside of him does not care to be known by 

the mind in ways that diminish its presence (All American), 2017 

Oil on canvas, 54 × 43 × 2 1/2 in. (137.16 × 109.22 × 6.35 cm) 

Private collection, courtesy Monique Meloche Gallery 

© Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photograph by Joseph Hyde

Amy Sherald 

Planes, Rockets, and the Spaces in Between, 2018 

Oil on canvas, 100 x 67 x 2 1/2 in. (254 x 170.1 x 6.35 cm) 

Baltimore Museum of Art, Purchase with exchange funds 

from the Pearlstone Family Fund and partial gift of 

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., 

BMA 2018.80. 

© Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photograph by Joseph Hyde

“It is a great honor to work with Amy Sherald, one of the most compelling, generous, and impactful artists of our time,” said Rujeko Hockley, Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum. “Her unwavering dedication and commitment to what she has called the ‘wonder of what it is to be a Black American’ is deeply felt, and I am thrilled to share her visionary work with our audiences.”

“American Sublime is a salve,” said artist Amy Sherald. “A call to remember our shared humanity and an insistence on being seen.”

“Few contemporary artists make images as gripping and indelible as Amy Sherald. Each of her paintings distills the essence of an individual while also conveying a broad sense of humanity,” said Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney’s Alice Pratt Brown Director. “Over the years that I’ve been in dialogue with Amy, we’ve visited works in the Whitney’s collection by Paul Cadmus, Barkley Henricks, and Edward Hopper, among so many American painters whose legacy she both inherits and extends. I can think of no better home for this important exhibition, which we’re honored to present.”

Amy Sherald 

They Call Me Redbone, 

but I'd Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake, 2009

Oil on canvas, 54 × 43 × 2 1/2 in. (137.16 × 109.22 × 6.35 cm) 

National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, 

gift of Steven Scott, Baltimore, in honor of the artist and 

the 25th anniversary of National Museum of Women in the Arts 

© Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. 

Photograph by Ryan Stevenson

Amy Sherald 

The Rabbit in the Hat, 2009 

Oil on canvas, 54 × 43 × 2 1/2 in. (137.16 × 109.22 × 6.35 cm) 

Green Family Art Foundation,

courtesy Adam Green Art Advisory 

© Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth 

Photograph by Christina Hussey

Amy Sherald 

Hangman, 2007

Oil on canvas, 100 × 67 × 2 1/2 in. (254 × 170.18 × 6.35 cm) 

Collection of Sheryll Cashin and Marque Chambliss 

© Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth 

Photograph by Kelvin Bulluck

Amy Sherald: American Sublime – Exhibition Overview

American Sublime explores the work of one of the most preeminent artists of our time. Arranged chronologically, the exhibition begins with Amy Sherald’s poetic early portraits and leads into the distinct and striking figure paintings for which she is best known. In her intentional privileging of Black Americans as her subjects, Amy Sherald tells stories of a population underrepresented in traditional portraiture. Influenced by her childhood fascination with family photographs—a black-and-white portrait of her grandmother in particular—Sherald aims to portray Black people in quiet, authentic moments. She chooses subjects who vary in age, gender, and identity, placing them in scenes from everyday life to share perspectives she wants to see depicted in the world.

Amy Sherald identifies as an American realist. She tells stories of the American experience through her paintings, much like artists Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. It wasn’t until she saw a painting with a Black person in it at a museum as a child that she realized she hadn’t yet seen herself represented in art history—a pivotal moment that continues to impact her career. Sherald’s portraits contribute new narratives to the collective American story by recasting figures in archetypal American roles, like a cowboy, a beauty queen, or a farmer. While Amy Sherald acknowledges the political dimension of her work, she wants her impact to reach beyond that. Amy Sherald invites viewers to challenge established preconceptions about race and engage with the universal stories told in her portraits, revealing the richness and complexity of humanity. Her signature gray palette for skin tones deemphasizes the focus on race, expanding her subjects’ narratives and demonstrating that there is more to an individual than can be contained in a single image or facet of their identity.

Amy Sherald 

Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), 2014

Oil on canvas, 54 × 43 × 2 1/2 in. (137.16 × 109.22 × 6.35 cm) 

Private Collection 

© Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth 

Photograph by Joseph Hyde

Amy Sherald 

The Bathers, 2015 

Oil on canvas, 72 1/8 × 67 × 2 1/2 in. (183.2 × 170.2 cm) 

Private Collection 

© Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photograph by Joseph Hyde

Amy Sherald 

A Midsummer Afternoon Dream, 2021 

Oil on canvas, 106 × 101 × 2 1/2 in. (269.24 × 256.54 × 6.35 cm)

Private Collection 

© Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photograph by Joseph Hyde

Photography is an important element of Sherald’s creative process, serving as her sketchbook and the foundation for her compositions. With the exception of her two commissioned portraits of First Lady Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, the artist selects each sitter based on their inherent qualities, such as poise, style, or wit—what she calls their “ineffable spark.” During photoshoots, Amy Sherald allows her models to pose organically, allowing for the synergy to build between them so that she can authentically capture their essence. She curates each scene and styles the subjects in clothing that speaks to the narrative she wishes to craft, creating a sense of magical realism. In titling her paintings, Amy Sherald often draws inspiration from Black women writers and poets like Toni Morrison and Lucille Clifton, reinterpreting their poetry to develop different contexts around the interior worlds of her subjects. Through her explorations, Amy Sherald redefines common beliefs about American identity, weaving a broader visual story of history and belonging. Ultimately, she portrays everyday Black people as individuals, not in contention or inherently politicized, but simply existing.

In addition to the paintings on view in the galleries, Amy Sherald presents work on the facade of the Horatio Street building across from the Museum. The newly commissioned work, Four Ways of Being, brings together four portraits by the artist—some never before seen in New York—and explores the intersection of past, present, and future with each capturing a distinct way of existing in the world. 

The Whitney presentation of this exhibition is organized by Rujeko Hockley, Arnhold Associate Curator, with David Lisbon, curatorial assistant. Amy Sherald: American Sublime is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and curated by Sarah Roberts, the former Andrew W. Mellon Curator and Head of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA

Amy Sherald: American Sublime is accompanied by a publication—the artist’s first comprehensive monograph—representing the broad sweep of Sherald’s painting practice and her key influences and inspirations. Contributors include exhibition curator Sarah Roberts, Elizabeth Alexander, Dario Calmese, Rhea Combs, and Deborah Willis. Amy Sherald: American Sublime is published by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in association with Yale University Press.

THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

99 Gansevoort Street, New York City

whitney.org

John Outterbridge @ Tilton Gallery, NYC

John Outterbridge 

Tilton Gallery, New York 

February 7 - April 13, 2024 

Tilton Gallery presents an exhibition of works by JOHN OUTTERBRIDGE (1933-2020). This is the artist’s fourth solo show at the gallery and the first comprehensive exhibition since his death in 2020. The exhibition spans his groundbreaking career and includes examples from the 1960s through the 2010s.

An artist, philosopher, thinker, community activist and mentor to other artists, John Outterbridge was born in 1933 in Greenville, North Carolina. He moved to Los Angeles from Chicago in 1963. In Los Angeles, he soon became a central and outspoken figure in the art community that included Noah Purifoy, David Hammons, Betye Saar, John Riddle and many others. He was co-founder and Artistic Director of the Communicative Arts Academy in Compton, CA from 1969-1975 and Director of the Watts Towers Arts Center in South Central Los Angeles from 1975-1992, succeeding his predecessor Noah Purifoy, and continuing to bring the arts and art education into the African American community.

Outterbridge’s work reflects both his experiences in the segregated South of the 1940s and 1950s and his involvement in the Los Angeles Black Arts Movement during the civil rights era. He grew up in a house and community where the re-purposing of discarded materials and objects was a given. His father moved “junk” for a living, storing the objects he collected in the family backyard till they found a new use. In Los Angeles, Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, adjacent to the Watts Towers Arts Center, represented a powerful example of how fragmented, found materials could be repurposed into an object of beauty.

John Outterbridge from early on assembled materials, found objects, and fragments of fabric into works of art that spoke to the human condition. Abstracted from their original uses, these materials became a language of both poetry and politics, commenting both on the history of African Americans in this country and the specific conditions of Black life. Outterbridge’s work evolved from abstraction to figuration and back to abstraction and in all cases found meaning both in the materials he used and how he used them. More often than not, his work spoke through symbolism and poetic metaphor, with titles adding historical references and word play endowing the work with twists of humor.

Throughout his career, John Outterbridge worked in overlapping and at times intertwining series, many of which are represented in this exhibition.

Beginning in the 1960s, John Outterbridge created a large group of works he named the Containment Series. These works were made of hammered and assembled sheets of metal, often combined with wood and leather. He gathered fragments of metal throughout LA, often walking by the railroad tracks with other artist friends, such as John Riddle. He worked the metal by hand till Mark di Suvero, who he met when he worked at the Pasadena Art Museum as preparator and educator, lent him his tools for working with metal when he left the city. Although visually abstract, this body of work speaks to the constraints of slavery and the continuing contemporary containment of Black Americans from freedom.

This was closely followed by the Rag Man Series, works made of sewn and painted canvas, stuffed with fabric to create literal and abstract three-dimensional stuffed and painted canvas “bags”, some with disjunctive American flag images painted on the surfaces. Unfortunately, many of these works have disappeared, but three major works remain: Case in Point, Rag Man Series, 1970 in the collection of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Plus-Tax: Shopping Bag Society, Rag Man Series, 1971 in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and Jive Ass Bird, Rag Man Series, 1971 in private hands.

Outterbridge’s Ethnic Heritage Series, roughly 1971-1982, is more directly figurative and addresses the question of ancestry. Complex, often abstracted figures reference African sculpture and ethnic effigies. These works extend the early “Rag Man” stuffed canvas shapes, turning them into representations of human figures such as Broken Dance in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Many of the figures from the Ethnic Heritage Series are personalized. Outterbridge carved their heads, placing them atop figures and wood structures that are clothed in colorful scraps of fabric. Urban Man, 1981 shows the head of a man peering out of a large almost space-age entrapment.

Other of these figures are individualized by braided hair and bear beaded necklaces, anklets and other charms, such as in Untitled, 1975 in the present exhibition, a sculpture of a female figure with ornate garments and beads carrying a bucket filled with black eyed peas that especially speaks to her African ethnic heritage. Tribal Figure, Ethnic Heritage Series, c. 1978-82 is a male figure that carries his assembled and ethnic garb and painted features regally.

A particularly strong and mysterious example of these figures, also in our exhibition, is the early Captive Image, Ethnic Heritage Series, c. 1971-72, one of a larger sub-series with this title. This figure exhibits two masklike heads attached to an abstracted torso, symbolic of conflicting public and interior personalities, a forced duality that was part of African American life in days of captivity and still in the present day. Another work from this subseries, also called Captive Image, Ethnic Heritage Series, 1978-82 displays the torso and legs of a figure, thrown across a wooden cart, directly referring to the history of captivity.

Another cart in this show, entitled Missing Mule, Ethnic Heritage Series, 1993 speaks to another theme Outterbridge often returns to in both content and title of numerous works. This cart, missing a mule to draw it, calls attention to the artist’s continuous search for the freedom symbolized by the mule and forty acres promised to slaves upon emancipation and not received; John Outterbridge reasserts his claim for all African Americans.

The mule, usually missing, literally appears, along with more scraps of torn or discarded materials, in an elaborate, otherwise abstract, Untitled wall sculpture of 2006. The long twig in this work, wrapped in these rags, including bits of the American flag, represents family lineage to the artist, referring again to history, both personal and that of the human race.

Outterbridge’s incorporation of the American flag in his work, almost always partial, but recognizable, is another recurring theme throughout his work, from early examples to his very late work.

In the 1990s, John Outterbridge returned to working with metal and wood, all the while continuing his use of discarded bits of fabric, including bits of torn American flags, important in his works from all periods. Window with Footnote, 1991, a metal wall construction with a recessed “window” in which sits a wooden leg, wrapped in fabric strips, as if to heal an injury. From 2009 to 2012, John Outterbridge made a large series of smaller wood and metal sculptures that refer back to instruments of containment as well as healing. I Mus Speak, 2012 in this show contains a small, but complete American flag amidst its otherwise abstract assembled parts.

Rag and Bag Idiom IV, 2012 belongs to one of the last series of works Outterbridge made. Harking back to the early Rag Man Series, they are made of canvas, sewn to construct multiple small irregular three-dimensional shapes, stuffed to maintain these shapes. Smaller than most of the earlier Rag Man works, these are painted in bright multi-colored hues. Remnants of other colored fabric or rags are attached and hang loosely. Dynamic and forceful for their size, these works convey Outterbridge’s inner optimism and add a fresh, new dimension to contemporary abstract art.

Finally, Tilton Gallery presents a re-installation of Rag Factory III. Outterbridge’s series of Rag Factory installations was first conceived for an exhibition in 2011 that was part of the Pacific Standard Time Los Angeles initiative, then a second configuration was shown at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and subsequently a third at our gallery and then at the David Zwirner Gallery in London. Not seen in the U.S. since 2012, this exuberant and playful installation takes the artist’s lifelong interest in the use and re-use of colorful fabric that he always called “rags” to create something akin to a May pole that takes up an entire room.

As expressed in a statement John Outterbridge wrote for the initial installation at LAX, “I see a rag as an object of many vibrations…you can’t escape the importance of the rag, no matter where you go or what you do…because of the colors, because of their previous lives and their histories, rags are pretty much a statement about our social position in the world and the importance of the cast-off. I like using metal a great deal too, or really any material that has a voice…I feel good about the use of rag as an expressive element, but I don’t see it as different than other aspects of my life…Rags have always been in and around the environments I’ve been a part of. With me, art has the audacity to be anything it needs to be at a given time. Anything. Because the creative process is the beginning of all things, no matter what we’re doing or where we are going.”

John Outterbridge has exhibited widely since the late sixties. His work was included in the Pompidou Center’s ground-breaking 2006 exhibition, Los Angeles, 1955-1985: The Birth of an Artistic Capital and in New York at Tilton Gallery in L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints, also 2006. His work was represented in six of the Pacific Standard Time 2011-12 exhibitions in Los Angeles, including in Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980. More recently, it was included in the traveling exhibition organized by the Tate Modern, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power; in Outliers and American Vanguard Art that originated at the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; and in West by Midwest: Geographies of Art and Kinship at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among a multitude of other important museum group shows. Outterbridge also participated in the 2015 Venice Biennale. He had a solo exhibition, John Outterbridge: Rag Man, at Art + Practice, organized by the Hammer Museum in 2015 that traveled to the Aspen Art Museum. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among many others.

TILTON GALLERY

8 East 76 Street New York, NY 10021

www.jacktiltongallery.com