“There was a lot of spontaneous rioting and fighting in the street and undocumented killings of African American people, and great racism,” Faith Ringgold recalled of the summer of 1967. “Everybody knew, everybody talked about it, but I would never see anything about it on television.” Her response to this omission was to create American People Series #20: Die. For the mural-sized painting, Ringgold depicted contemporary events using a figurative visual language—at a time when the art world celebrated abstraction.
The works in this gallery show artists similarly picturing history, both as it was broadcast and as they experienced it in their own lives. Some working in the 1960s and ’70s found their source material broadly available in the media. Others favored more symbolic representation, as with Bertina Lopes’s employment of a rougher materiality to convey the shared trauma of colonial violence.
Organized by Esther Adler, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, with Rachel Rosin, Curatorial Assistant, departments of Drawings and Prints and Curatorial Affairs.
