Faith Ringgold

How do our particular memories, histories and traditions inform us as individuals and shape the marks we leave on the world? For more than 40 years, Faith Ringgold has been formulating answers to this question in the paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and—perhaps most famously—quilts in which she documents her experiences as an African-American woman, mother, daughter, and artist.

This exhibition focuses on Ringgold’s work on paper of the last three decades, a lesser known aspect of her extensive and multiform oeuvre. The show includes more than twenty-five prints and small paintings, echoing the themes of protest that characterized her early paintings with narrative subjects like Tar Beach #2 familiar from her quilts, as well as examples from her recent series on jazz musicians. Several prints were executed at the Experimental Printmaking Institute at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, a program dedicated to bringing undergraduate students and professional artists together—a mission that resonates perfectly with Mount Holyoke College’s longstanding commitment to promoting such interactions in the classroom and the Museum. The broadest and most revealing survey of its kind.