When New York’s Museum of Modern Art reopened in 2019 after a radical rehang, its most headline-grabbing display placed Faith Ringgold’s American People Series #20: Die eye to eye with Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. For years, MoMA had been criticised for its shocking gender imbalance and lack of diversity. Ringgold was among the feminists to protest about the museum in the late 1960s, but it would be decades before it paid attention. The museum’s permanent display told a story of modern art imagined as a sequential progression driven almost entirely by the work of white men. In 2019, that started to change.
Painted 60 years apart – Picasso’s was completed in 1907, Ringgold’s in 1967 – the pairing of Die and Les Demoiselles invited a different kind of storytelling, one that acknowledged the debt of influence Picasso owed African art, the influence he in turn exerted over generations that followed and the rich complexity that might emerge from acknowledging plural art histories.
