The Brooklyn Rail

“We know the answers to a few things,” Faith Ringgold says during a TV interview at the center of American People, a retrospective spanning the 1960s to the present, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA). During the interview, she references the knowledge of Black women and simultaneously critiques the infamous 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, in which its author, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, makes a dubious case for achieving racial equality. He pathologizes the matriarchal structures within Black culture, further dismissing the views of Black women in America. Ringgold calls it a “conspiracy to keep Black women’s mouths shut.” Then, she asks, “What if our mouths were open?” This question is subtly embedded in each series of the exhibition, unveiling “American People” as a tool of myth-making bonded by symbols of cultural kitsch (flag paraphernalia, checkered and gingham picnic table cloths, and glorification of rebel colonists), exploitation, and geography (both chosen and under duress).

Of no coincidence, the first series of the show in a mint green room is the “American People” series from early on in Ringgold’s career. Chosen as the exhibition’s namesake, the “American People” series stands out and has many works unique to the Chicago presentation curated by Manilow Senor Curator Jamillah James and Assistant Curator Jack Schneider. Collectively, each work’s haunting inset eyes follow you as you move; the nose contours are a gloomy deep blue, like caverns to get lost in; red, white, and blue imagery prevails, and each depiction is skeletal. For example, American People # 3: Neighbors (1963) recalls the familiar stance and empty gaze of Wood’s American Gothic (1930) by showing a group of white people standing, absent, almost as if to show the haunting, omnipresent, blank stare at “the other.” It is a look of leering, gawking, discomfort, or shock detecting an outlier amidst homogeneity.

American People Series # 8: The In Crowd (1964) shows the hands of the white figures pushing down Black figures. Most notably, one white figure has their hand over a Black figure’s mouth, yet another depiction of silencing. It allegorizes the unfortunate reality of attempts to enact inclusion—a seat at the table but stifling our voices. The repeated, three-headed, hydra-like faces in Early Works #21: The Trio (1964) look like a crisp motion blur (the subject moving so fast that multiples appear). The repetition of the faces suggests movement like the multiple-sidedness of Blackness in America and how it’s a dance of code-switching and survival mechanisms.

Early Works #22: Uptight Negro (1964) with two stacked faces on top of one another imitates the carnivalesque optical illusions of fun houses where things are never as they appear. This showcases the inherent spectacle within the idea of “American People” and how it forces a type of contortion. Similarly, American People Series #9: American Dream (1964) depicts a Black woman on one half and a white woman on the other. Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country puts the work in a new light because of a scene where a character uses blood magic to shapeshift into a white woman’s body so she can work as a clerk on the floor at a segregated department store. Not only do these ideologies position white and Black women as antithetical, but they show a duality of inflicted sexism.

As the gallery compresses and opens, a soft sculpture funerary scene of works made from 1973 appear: Auntie Mask, Bubba Mask, Child’s Mask #1 and Child’s Mask #2, Dance Mask #1, Dance Mask #2, and Dance Mask #, Moma Mask, Mourner’s Mask #1 and Mourner’s Mask #2, Pop Mask, and The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro (1975–89) displays mourners reluctantly moving forward after loss. Three presumed family members have funerary veils on, crying. The crowd, instead of depicting people outright, symbolizes masses wailing — mouths agape and limbless. Their Kuosi-Society-Elephant-Mask-like forms emit power and the importance of collectivity. Their palpable effect is the magnum opus of the exhibition.

Joining in the chorus are text-based posters and archival ephemera of agitation propaganda. For example, The United States of Attica (1972) indicates the exploitation inherent in the idea of the “American People.” The text at the bottom says, “This map of American violence is incomplete. Please write in whatever you find lacking.” and “A laconic invitation to add further acts of violence emphasizes historical continuity and ceaselessness of violence as a defining characteristic of the development of the United States of America.” Ringgold appropriating US maps and American flag imagery pairs with archival documentation of her being charged with American flag defamation.

Afterward, a room of TVs introduces Ringgold’s voice outside of visual communication. In an interview on a gallery monitor, a white male host kept putting words in Ringgold’s mouth or cutting her off. His interruptions felt like the nuisance of a fly buzzing in the ear no matter how many times swatted. Then it occurred to me: the pestilence is the white supremacist patriarchy. Often, she repeats herself to be heard much like the doubles, threes, and repetition in the exhibition. LET HER SPEAK. Contrastingly, the rich dialogue between Ringgold and her daughter Michelle Wallace, a Black feminist scholar, had a dynamic of love and respect.

Lastly, a memorial of Black children benedicts the viewer. How do we confront injustices and how we are implicated in the term “American People?” In The American Collection #6: The Flag is Bleeding #2 (1997), two children hug a Black maternal figure with blood streaming from the red stripes in the American flag and a larger soft sculpture, The Screaming Woman (1981) with tears watches over Atlanta Children (1981), black dolls in a vitrine. As the lasting impression of the exhibition, it punctuates the parallel of indifference toward the Atlanta child murders of the 1980s and the Palestinian children dying and/or in captivity in Gaza today, Ringgold’s poster Save Our Children in Atlanta (1981) says, “Make it impossible for the sins of hate and indifference to persist in America. Stop child murders!” Ringgold makes her voice loud and clear as well as the curators. It is their way of saying, YOU HEARD ME!