Film Forum

A great painting tells a compelling story. When its provenance deepens that story, it becomes an extraordinary and impactful performance piece. Documentarian and activist Catherine Gund tracks the labyrinthine ordeal borne by Faith Ringgold’s 1971 painting “For the Women’s House” — originally created for the women incarcerated on Rikers Island, then relegated to mishandling, defacing, and deep storage. Artist and rapper Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, herself formerly incarcerated and commissioned to create a new work for the Rikers women, bands together with Ringgold, politicians, philanthropists, and corrections officers against Kafkaesque bureaucracy to liberate the original painting from Rikers and, more profoundly, Black women from mass incarceration.    

Presented with support from The Richard Brick, Geri Ashur, and Sara Bershtel Fund for Social Justice Documentaries, The Helen Frankenthaler Endowed Fund for Films on Art, and The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Fund

2024     90 MIN.     USA     AUBIN PICTURES      
 

Trailer

Reviews

“Hearing and seeing [Ringgold] talk is reason enough to see the film. Ringgold died in 2024 at 93, and is widely considered one of the most important American artists of the 20th century, a native New Yorker who was unflagging in her activism and commitments to dismantle racism wherever it surfaced.”
– Alissa Wilkinson, The New York Times

“A poignant protest against mass incarceration… [that] navigates the trail-blazing nature of [Faith] Ringgold’s career and how [Mary Enoch Elizabeth] Baxter, the younger artist, followed in Ringgold’s footsteps as a practitioner of Black radical art… By showcasing Baxter’s art alongside Ringgold, the film dynamically invokes how contemporary artists have historically attempted to address systemic injustices Black people face in society.”
– Akané Okoshi, The Brooklyn Rail