Opening in February, New Museum to Present the First Full Retrospective in New York of Faith Ringgold

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Retrospective Is Joined by the First Solo Exhibition in the U.S. of Artist #daniellie, Presented in Museum's Lobby GalleryNew York, NY...From February 17 to June 5, 2022, the #newmuseum will present the first full retrospective in #newyork of the art of #faithringgold (b. 1930, #newyork, NY). Bringing together over sixty years of work, "Faith Ringgold: American People" provides the most comprehensive assessment to date of Ringgold's impactful vision. Her role as an artist, author, educator, and organizer has made her a key figure whose work links the multi-disciplinary achievements of the Harlem Renaissance to the political art of young Black artists working today. During the 1960s, Ringgold created some of the most indelible art of the Civil Rights era by melding her own unique style of figurative painting with a bold, transformative approach to the language of protest. In subsequent decades, she challenged accepted hierarchies of art and craft through her experimental quilt paintings and undertook a deeply studied reimagining of art history to produce narratives that bear witness to the historical sacrifices and achievements of Black Americans.

This exhibition will feature works from across Ringgold's best-known series, tracking the development of her figurative style and thematic vision as they evolved and expanded to meet the urgency of the political and social changes taking place in America during her lifetime. The first section of the exhibition will provide an extensive look at Ringgold's early paintings, including the American #people and Black Light series. Using what the artist described as a "super-realist" visual language, Ringgold captured the racial and gender divisions in 1960s American society with searing insight. Her three large-scale "murals"—including the celebrated American #people Series #20: Die (1967), recently juxtaposed with Pablo Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" at The Museum of Modern Art and American #people Series #18: The Flag is Bleeding, which was recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art—will be shown together for the first time in #newyork since 1988. They will be presented alongside her iconic political posters, which advocated for collective causes like support for the Black Panther Party and freeing activist Angela Davis.

The exhibition will also examine Ringgold's embrace of non-Western and American craft traditions, including her performance objects and "soft sculptures." A large selection of her early unstretched canvases adorned with sewn fabric borders, inspired by Tibetan thangkas, will also be displayed. These works demonstrate Ringgold's attempts to transcend a predominately white art historical tradition to find forms more suitable for the radical exploration of gender and racial identity that her work would go on to enact. Although lesser known within Ringgold's oeuvre, these canvases led directly to the creation of her celebrated story quilt paintings of the 1980s and 1990s.

Ringgold's story quilts are some of the most influential artworks of the past fifty years. Drawing on both personal autobiography and collective histories, the story quilts point to larger social conditions and cultural transformations—from the Harlem Renaissance to the realities of Ringgold's life as a working mother, artist, and activist. This retrospective includes a wide range of Ringgold's quilts, including formative pieces created with her mother, important early series like The Bitter Nest and Change, selections from other notable bodies of work including The American Collection and Coming to Jones Road, and, in a landmark display, the first complete presentation of her series, The French Collection, in nearly twenty-five years. Together, these story quilts position the artist's own personal and professional biography in dialogue with key moments in art history and in the expansive narrative of the American experience across the twentieth century, reimagining both the birth of this country and the myths of modernity as polyphonic narratives of emancipation and resistance.

This exhibition continues Ringgold's long history with the #newmuseum. She has participated in the notable exhibitions "The Decade Show" (1990) and "A Labor of Love" (1996); and in 1998 was the subject of the celebrated solo exhibition titled "Dancing at the Louvre: Faith Ringgold's French Collection and Other Story Quilts."

The exhibition catalogue, co-published with Phaidon, will be the most significant collection of scholarship on Ringgold's work to date, with new contributions by curators, writers, and artists across generations, including Amiri Baraka, Diedrick Brackens, LeRonn Brooks, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jordan Casteel, Bridget Cooks, Mark Godfrey, Lucy Lippard, Tschabalala Self, Michele Wallace, and Zoé Whitley. This fully illustrated publication will focus on all aspects of Ringgold's career—the range of contributors speaks to the wide variety of audiences her work has reached over the past fifty years. Long overdue, this retrospective will provide a timely opportunity to appreciate a critical voice in the history of American art.

"Faith Ringgold: American People" is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, and Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator.

"Daniel Lie: Unnamed Entities"
From February 17 to June 5, 2022, the #newmuseum will present Unnamed Entities, a new commission by Indonesian-Brazilian artist Daniel Lie (b. 1988, São Paulo, Brazil). "Daniel Lie: Unnamed Entities" is the artist's first solo exhibition in the United States.

Since 2010, Lie has been using organic materials to create largescale pieces that simultaneously grow and decay. Unnamed Entities (2022) is an expansive installation created specifically for the Museum's Lobby Gallery. The work incorporates traditional terracotta ceramic vases, jute hemp fabric, natural fiber ropes, straw hay bales, mud with spores and seeds, and thousands of cut flowers. These materials will evolve and transmutate throughout the exhibition as they rot, mold, sprout, and change shapes and hues in unpredictable ways. Lie understands their works as living entities endowed with awareness and agency, and considers the process of rotting as a way to complicate the binary opposition between life and death.

Building on legacies of migration and queer studies, Lie's work demonstrates how abjection can be a tool of subversion and expansion. Their practice celebrates natural cycles of transformation and the many interdependent exchanges that structure ecosystems. A fundamental aspect of Daniel Lie's practice is their desire to develop works which de-center human agency and subjectivity. Working in collaboration with forces they term "other-than-human beings," such as bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, minerals, spirits, and ancestors, Lie creates site- and time-specific works that can be experienced through multisensory channels. By giving visibility to materials that transmutate, decay, and evolve, Lie's ecosystems highlight the intimate yet expansive coexistences among diverse beings, acknowledging our shared and continuous participation in the processes of living, dying, and rotting. Unnamed Entities provides a space for meditation about time and exalts experiences of existing, surviving, remembering, honoring, and mourning.

"Daniel Lie: Unnamed Entities" is curated by Bernardo Mosqueira, ISLAA Curatorial Fellow, #newmuseum.

Daniel Lie (b. 1988, São Paulo) lives and works in Berlin. They have had recent solo exhibitions at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (2021); Casa do Povo, São Paulo, Brazil (2019); Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh, Scotland (2019); Performeum/ Vienna Festwochen, Vienna, Austria (2017); Change - Change, Budapest, Hungary (2016); Kampnagel, Hamburg, Germany (2016); and Centro Cultural São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil (2015). Their work has been included in group exhibitions at numerous venues, including Museu de #arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2021): Atonal Festival, Berlin, Germany (2021); Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, Germany (2021); Solar dos Abacaxis, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2020); Cemeti Institute for Art and Society, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2020); Valongo Festival, Santos, Brazil (2019); Osage Foundation, Hong Kong (2018); 14th Yogyakarta Biennale, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2017); Frestas - Art Triennial, Sorocaba, Brazil (2017); MuseumsQuartier, Vienna, Austria (2017); Centro Cultural do Banco do Brasil, Brazil (2021, 2016); and 34o #arte Pará, Belém do Pará, Brazil (2016).