Maria Garcia, “’Black Radical Women’ Exhibition At The ICA Seeks To Correct The Record.” WBUR, Aug 3, 2018.
In her 1971 mural “For The Women’s House,” artist Faith Ringgold painted women of different ethnicities partaking in tasks that were at once mundane and yet also required radical ambition: driving a bus at a time when women were banned from doing so in New York City, playing basketball for a professional team decades before the inception of the WNBA, being a doctor, mothering a child of a different race freely and without judgment. The 8-foot by 8-foot mural imbues solidarity — women of varying skin colors co-existing and thriving.
Ringgold’s mural is the powerful opening to “We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965 to 1985,” now on view at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art until Sept. 30.
“For The Women’s House” was created in 1971, when Ringgold had already established herself as a prominent voice of black artistry and activism, and yet she struggled to find a home for the piece. After her own alma mater, City College, turned it down, Ringgold asked
herself — as she later told her daughter, the critic Michele Wallace — “Do you want your work to be somewhere where nobody wants it, or do you want it to be somewhere it is needed?” (…)
At the ICA right now, art offers a corrective — not just for the art canon, but for history. These are the voices once stifled and ignored. Emma Amos’ painting “Sandy and her Husband,” of an interracial couple happy, in love and safe in their own home, reminds us just how daring and subversive it is to be carefree while black in this country. Lorraine O’Grady’s performance piece “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Goes to the New Museum,” in which she dressed in a gown of white gloves and crashed museum parties, illustrates how these women were on the forefront of form and the avant-garde. They were there. They were loud. But no one listened.
Who are we ignoring now?