New artwork text! This one is about an artwork by the incredible artist, activist and author Faith Ringgold (1930-2024), commissioned for a women’s centre at the notorious Rikers Island jail in New York.
There are multiple layers of obliteration in this story, involving administrative and institutional vandalism, poor installation decisions that rendered the work unseeable, incarcerated men who white-washed it, and prison authorities who just forgot about it.
Image: Faith Ringgold, ‘For the Women’s House’, 1971. Made for the Women’s House of Detention, Rikers Island, New York, USA.