On a damp night in November 1970, Faith Ringgold, who has died aged 93, was locking the doors to an exhibition at the Judson Memorial church in Greenwich Village, when four strangers turned up pleading to see the show of flags she and several other radical artists of the downtown New York scene were staging. After a brief look at her painting, Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger (1969), in which the word “Die” is hidden among the stars of the American flag and the red stripes are adjusted to spell out the second word, the undercover police pulled out their badges and arrested her for desecrating the stars and stripes.
The art world was initially no more receptive to Ringgold’s searing indictments of structural racism and misogyny than the law. “David Rockefeller sent two people to buy [the painting]. But they ran away when they realised you can read the words …” Ringgold recalled. “It was my way of saying that too many American people go to bed hungry, while the government spent billions to place their flag on the moon.”
