“Interventions: Re-writing the Canon in Faith Ringgold’s Woman Looking in a Mirror”

While pictorial and literary motifs linking women and mirrors can be traced to the ancient world, the theme has more recently played a significant role in shaping the formal vocabularies of modernism and postmodernism. This paper examines its articulation in Faith Ringgold’s Woman Looking in a Mirror (oil on canvas, 1966), #16 in her “American People Series” (1963-1967). Set against a background of lush foliage, Ringgold’s black protagonist gazes pensively at her own reflection. Referencing a long visual history of women and mirrors in Western art, the painting forcefully challenges its conventionalized standards of beauty, meaning, and value as it corrects the raced and gendered gaze too often directed at women of color. Although other “American People” paintings – in particular, DIE and The Flag is Bleeding— have recently received considerable critical attention, relatively little scholarship has been directed to the smaller scale canvases in this series that explore “what was happening to black people [in the 1960s]” in a more private and intimate manner. The relationship of Woman Looking in a Mirror to the Civil and Women’s Rights movements of the 1960s, Ringgold’s artistic development, her distinctive interventions into art history, and her commitment to political activism in the arts warrant the further exploration this paper provides. As the artist’s eighty-ninth birthday approaches, this is an opportune moment to re-examine an important work from her early oeuvre in relation to her lifetime achievement and enduring legacy.