backstory: Stories and Histories
It’s long…sorry.
So…it’s not my first time on the cutting room floor. That happens when you’re interviewed a lot. But this one smacks.
That said, the new film, Paint Me a Road Out of Here, which features Faith Ringgold’s commissioned mural For the Women’s House, is an important story about the power of art in relation to incarceration. Faith would have loved it. You should see it.
But stories are not histories.
During my interview for the film, which, like any mention of the Neuberger, landed on the cutting room floor, it all came back to me. Standing next to Faith Ringgold at the Neuberger in the fall of 2010 as she saw For the Women’s House out of Rikers and on public view for the first time. Seeing the joy on her face. Watching her slowly pore over it. Hearing her stories about it again…stories about painting it and her choices, its relocation in the prison, the literal whitewashing with housepaint of the canvas, the guard who contacted her about it being at risk, its restoration.
Most meaningful though was watching her response when asked: “Is that you, there in the painting?” A slow smile. Yes. She had indeed included herself among those aspirational figures. Speaking to The New Yorker about the importance of the mural being able to be seen publicly, Faith said: “I think it can inspire some women to see the history, if nothing else. It is history, isn’t it? And we can go ever further, if we care to. And we do.” (“Behind Bars,” The New Yorker, October 25, 2010). Of all that I shared in my Paint interview, that’s among what I most wish had been represented…the story of a relatively young artist seeing herself as aspirational to others.
It was a long struggle for the Neuberger to get that painting out of Rikers for the first time. A year of letters and phone calls to the Warden’s office. Waiting anxiously for a call from my Chief Preparator, David Bogosian, from the gym at Rikers. Could they get it off the wall safely? Waiting to see if it would actually show up at the Neuberger, which it did just a day or so before we opened our show, the first survey of her earliest series, American People and Black Light. The heartbreak of having to send it back even though I knew well that Faith didn’t want that to happen. But back then, fifteen years ago now, Rikers wasn’t on the verge of closing and the city expected its painting back, as do all lenders.
As an academic museum, the Neuberger works hard to put histories back together, as we did for Faith’s earliest body of work, including For the Women’s House. We don’t do it for the recognition; we do it for the artists.
For years after that project, every time Faith and I saw each other she would say to me: “WE DID IT!” That greeting always meant so much to me. It still does, and maybe now in a different way.
Tracy Fitzpatrick
Director, Neuberger Museum of Art
P.S. Watch this video to hear Faith describe the work:
