In “American People,” all 13 of the artist’s “French Collection” quilts-which effectively rewrote the history of modern art, imagining the life of a fictional Black artist and model in 1920s Paris-will be reunited for the first time in nearly 25 years as will the graphic American People Series #18: The Flag Is Bleeding, American People Series #19: U.S. (As Rinngold puts it in her memoir, We Flew over the Bridge, “That way I could roll up my paintings and put them in a trunk and ship them in the same way I used to ship clothes to camp.”) “She has said that she started making the quilts because she didn’t want to wait for her husband to help her move her canvases,” Gioni explains. Ringgold’s quilts, with their hand-painted tableaus, constituted another act of circumvention. For example, after being rejected from Spiral-a Black artists’ collective peopled by the likes of Richard Mayhew, Romare Bearden, and a single woman, Emma Amos-in 1964, she took up with the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre, exhibiting her work in a caravan that toured through Harlem. “The amazing thing about Faith and her work was that whenever nobody noticed her, or whenever she didn’t find the support, she built the support,” Gioni says. Central to “American People” are Ringgold’s wide-ranging artistic innovations, mostly inspired by the difficulties she faced navigating the art scene in 1960s New York.

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