New artwork text! Faith Ringgold’s For the Women’s House, (1971) was a painting commissioned for the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island, the notorious jail in the Bronx, New York City.
There are multiple layers of obliteration in this narrative, involving the poor installation decisions that rendered the work unseeable, the men who white-washed it, and the prison authorities who forgot about it.
Image: Faith Ringgold, For the Women’s House, 1971. Image courtesy of the artist and New York City Department of Correction.