In 1971, artist Faith Ringgold was offered a $3,000 grant by the New York State Council on the Arts to make an artwork for a public institution in New York City. This was Ringgold’s first public commission, as well as her first explicitly feminist one, and she wanted to build on the activist work she had been doing in the Black Arts Movement, fighting for gender and racial equality in the US.

She first approached her alma mater, The City College of New York, but was turned down, not explicitly on the grounds that she was a Black woman artist, but the implied message was clear. Next, she went to the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island, the notorious jail in the Bronx that acts as a holding pen for thousands of people awaiting trial and which has come to represent the catastrophic failure – and structural racism – of the American corrections system. There, Ringgold received a more positive reception and was commissioned to make a work for one of the communal areas.

Ringgold’s process involved in-depth, on-going conversations with the women in the jail, forging direct relationships with those who would live close to the work for long stretches of time. When she asked one of them what they wanted to see, the response was: “show me a way out of here”¹. Ringgold made a painting depicting women of different ages and races doing non-traditional jobs. In eight panels, police officers, professional athletes, a bus driver, a musician, a doctor and a president hold the viewers’ gaze. They aren’t smiling or assuming performatively submissive, crowd-pleasing expressions, they are serious, active, focused. Recognising that the lives of many incarcerated people had been stunted by a toxic mix of racism, sexism, dismissal and exclusion, Ringgold was looking to broaden their image of themselves “by showing women in roles that have not traditionally been theirs…and to show women’s universality.”²

For the Women’s House, a painting measuring 2.5 x 2.5 meters, was made on two separate canvases in Ringgold’s Harlem apartment. Each piece was too large to fit into the lift and had to be carried down fourteen flights of stairs by the artist’s daughters. Guards loaded them into a prison truck, attracting crowds in the process, and transported them to the Women’s House of Detention, where the work was installed in a brick-walled corridor in January 1972. Black and white photographs show a festive occasion at which the prison band played and best outfits were worn. Ringgold continued her conversations with the women by volunteering at the prison on a monthly basis, holding mask-making workshops and helping with theatre productions, career counselling and addiction services.

Sixteen years later, in 1988, the prison was converted into a men’s-only facility. At some point soon after this – it’s not clear when – the painting was covered in a layer of white paint. As is revealed in Catherine Gund’s documentary Paint Me a Road Out of Here (2024), a corrections officer named Barbara Drummond remembered the painting and went looking for it. She eventually found it in the staff kitchen and raised hell when she realised what had happened. She called Ringgold to inform her of this act of ‘vandalism’, passing on the news that one of the men had told her they were “tired of looking at all those bitches”. Someone had volunteered to paint another picture over the newly white-washed canvas but this never came to pass (perhaps they were overwhelmed by the scale of the endeavour). The work was moved to the basement, presumably in an attempt to hide the evidence of destruction.

Funds were raised to restore the painting and it was discovered that the men’s act of obliteration was carried out with water-based paint, which – despite its decisively thick layering – meant that it could be removed from the original oil-painted surface relatively easily. The restored painting was moved to a new women’s facility in the Rose M. Singer Centre (RMSC) on Rikers Island where it was installed in a gym above a basketball court, protected by plexiglass and impossible to see.

In 2017 the Brooklyn Museum included For the Women’s House in their groundbreaking show We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965 – 85 where it was warmly received. When it was returned to RMSC it was installed in a corridor that few could access. Two plexiglass panels covering the work overlapped in the centre; white paint marks had appeared on the frame as well as the Plexiglass; and strip lights rendered it, once again, invisible. At this point, Ringgold asked for the work to be placed outside the volatile city jail system and suggested it should go back to the Brooklyn Museum.

With calls to close Rikers mounting in recent years, advocates for the painting began to worry: would the work survive a potential wrecking ball? And even if it did, would it end up in Department of Corrections storage somewhere, never to be seen again?

In 2022 an agreement was reached by the New York City Department of Correction to place the work on a ten-year loan to the Brooklyn Museum. Artist Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, who had been incarcerated at Rikers, was commissioned to create a new community mural to replace For the Women’s House.

There is no ending to this story. The painting’s home is still uncertain. Rikers Island is due to close in 2027, although this deadline is unlikely to be met, given the level of political in-fighting, intractable infrastructure delays, and acrimonious disputes over where to relocate incarcerated people. It seems plausible that ownership could be handed over to the Brooklyn Museum, which was Ringgold’s expressed wish before she died in 2024, aged 94: “We need that painting in a safe place”, she told an audience of New York arts patrons, “and that safe place is the Brooklyn Museum!”³. But this directly contradicts the artist’s views, expressed in a 1972 interview, in which she says “I asked myself, do you want your work to be somewhere nobody wants it, or do you want it to be somewhere it is needed.”⁴ A museum can offer safety and a relatively broad audience, but a jail – that’s perhaps where the work is most useful.

It gets more complicated though, when we consider how the painting could be received by Rikers population today, at a time when women have, in the main, achieved those professional goals of priest, doctor, sportsperson etc., but still they continue to be incarcerated, brutalised and forgotten. Perhaps the painting no longer provides a pathway out, but is experienced as trauma and thus becomes hopeless rather than life-affirming⁵.

Some have called the destruction of For the Women’s House an act of administrative vandalism, but there are multiple layers of obliteration in this narrative, involving the initial rejection of Ringgold by City College, the poor installation decisions that rendered the work unseeable, the men who white-washed it, and the prison authorities who forgot about it. Now that Faith Ringgold has achieved international acclaim, the cultural, artistic and financial value of the painting should, finally, be recognised, but who will get to live with it, and at what cost?