MARIA DUARTE picks the best and worst of a crowded year of films
Ringgold the liberator
Faith Ringgold is one of the most important US artists ever. CHRISTINE LINDEY explains why
JOSEPHINE BARBARO welcomes a diverse anthology of experiences by autistic women that amounts to a resounding chorus, demanding to be heard
PAUL BUHLE recommends an eminently useful book that examines the political opportunities for popular anti-fascist intervention
PETER MASON is entertained by the autobiography of Charlie Harper, one of punk’s most enduring figures
JAMIE BRITTON reaches for the sick bucket as he is forced to engorge detail after detail of the Royal Family’s wealth
STEVE JOHNSON picks his favourites from the many memorable albums of the year, and one stunning new festival
Faith Ringgold
Serpentine Gallery, London
★★★★★
A VETERAN of the 1960s civil rights, feminist and Black Power movements, Faith Ringgold is a rare artist; she has much to say, all of it important and she expresses it in visually striking ways.
She was born in 1930 in Harlem where her fashion designer/maker mother and lorry driver father prioritised a college education and encouraged her love of art. Although her thorough but traditional art education never mentioned black artists, she’d grown up immersed in the culturally vibrant Harlem Renaissance.
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In an exhibition of the graphic art of Lorna Miller, MATT KERR takes a lungful of the oxygen of dissent
ANDY HEDGECOCK relishes two exhibitions that blur the boundaries between art and community engagement
CAROLINE FOWLER explains how the slave trade helped establish the ‘golden age’ of Dutch painting and where to find its hidden traces
The Morning Star sorts the good eggs from the rotten scoundrels of the year