Black Light Series #8: Red White Black Nigger

Gallery Text

Best known today for her story quilts addressing feminism and racial justice, Ringgold’s work of the 1960s and ’70s was more polemical. In Red White Black Nigger, Ringgold confronts the highly charged and topical subject of the role of blackness within American culture. Inspired in part by Jasper Johns’s flag paintings, Ringgold references the colors of the U.S. flag both linguistically and visually. She uses black pigment to modulate the work’s dominant red, white, and blue pigments, rather than mixing them with white as painters traditionally had done. Most pointedly, Ringgold painted the word “NIGGER” within each horizontal swath of color. This abhorrent, incendiary word evokes centuries of oppression and the violent reaction to the struggle for civil rights and the black power movement in the late 1960s. Yet against the darkened background, the word nearly disappears, a possible allusion to the white cultural erasure of African Americans and the pervasive stain of racism within the national fabric. Ringgold’s substitution of the word “black” in the third row, where one might expect the word “blue,” stops the viewer short and insists on recognition of this country’s inability to deliver on its promise of liberty for all.

Identification and Creation

Object Number: 2014.18
People: Faith Ringgold, American (New York, New York born 1930)
Title: Black Light Series #8: Red White Black Nigger
Classification: Paintings
Work Type: painting
Date: 1969
Culture: American
Persistent Link: https://hvrd.art/o/349671

Physical Descriptions

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

61 × 61 cm (24 × 24 in.)
framed: 63.8 × 63.8 × 4.1 cm (25 1/8 × 25 1/8 × 1 5/8 in.)

Inscriptions and Marks

inscription: on verso, in blue paint: 9 [number encircled] Nigger 24 x 24

Provenance

Recorded Ownership History: Faith Ringgold, created 1969, sold [through ACA Galleries, New York]; to the Harvard Art Museums, 2014.

Acquisition and Rights

Credit Line: Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Richard Norton Memorial Fund
Accession Year: 2014
Object Number: 2014.18
Division: Modern and Contemporary Art
Contact: am_moderncontemporary@harvard.edu
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Publication History

Michele Wallace, American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold's Paintings on the 1960s, exh. cat., ed. Thom Collins and Tracy Fitzpatrick, Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, New York, 2010), p. 103, fig. 41, ill. (color)
Helen Molesworth, ed., Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, exh. cat., Skira Rizzoli Publications, Inc. (New York, 2016), p. 63, fig. 29, ill. (color)
Andrew Russeth, The Storyteller: At 85, Her Star Still Rising, Faith Ringgold Looks Back on Her Life in Art, Activism, and Education, ARTnews (New York, 2016), Vol. 115, No. 1, ill. (color)
Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari, ed., Faith Ringgold: American People, exh. cat. (London and New York, 2022), p. 60, ill. (color)

Exhibition History

American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold's Paintings of the 1960s, Neuberger Museum of Art, 09/11/2010 - 12/19/2010
32Q: 1100 60’s Experiment, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, 11/16/2014 - 09/26/2017
Faith Ringgold: American People, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 02/15/2022 - 06/05/2022
Faith Ringgold: American People, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 11/18/2023 - 02/25/2024

Verification Level

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2014.18: Black Light Series #8: Red White Black Nigger