Under a Blood Red Sky, 2007
Offset Lithograph
Edition of 90
30 x 21 1/2 in
Collaborative Printer: Bob Franklin
In 1992, Faith Ringgold left Harlem for Englewood, New Jersey, carrying a straightforward dream: a studio, a garden, a place to work. What she found instead was years of organized resistance from neighbors who treated her arrival as an intrusion. For more than six years she fought the town board for the permits she needed to build. Having traveled the world but never lived anywhere but Harlem, she would later describe the experience as deeply traumatic. She turned to what she always had. Art, she said, is a healer.
Under a Blood Red Sky is one of several versions of a scene Ringgold has returned to across her practice, sometimes titled Coming to Jones Road Under a Blood Red Sky. A road leads toward a small white house. Text borders the image, narrating the journey of two enslaved people moving north through the Underground Railroad. The composition holds both histories at once: the nineteenth-century passage toward freedom and Ringgold's own twentieth-century reckoning with a racism that never announced itself as such. Jones Road becomes layered, a place where the ugliness of the past and the ugliness of the present press against each other, and where beauty, in the form of trees and plants and flowers and the particular light of a sky gone red, insists on existing anyway.
Ringgold has spoken about trying to speak in the voice of her grandmothers and grandfathers, the people whose endurance made it possible for her to walk free and tell their story. This print is part of that effort.
