“Faith did it first.”

Faith Ringgold at her dining table in Englewood, N.J., surrounded by her work “California Dah #3, 1983,” envisioning what her mother experienced when she died. “I always have to feel something to paint it,” Ms. Ringgold says. The doll is Cassie, from her children’s book, “Tar Beach.”Credit…Meron Tekie Menghistab for The New York Times

From the June 11 New York Times profile on the legendary visual artist Faith Ringgold, someone else who can be considered canonical:

“It’s a story of survival and redemption and speaks to powerful social and historical inequities,” said Sheena Wagstaff, the museum’s chairwoman of Modern and Contemporary Art. She oversees a collection that includes younger black female artists (Kara Walker, Lorna Simpson and Wangechi Mutu among them), but notes that while some are better known, “Faith did it first.”

Ms. Wagstaff admires in particular how Ms. Ringgold incorporated black women into her scenes of daily life, adding that while Beyoncé may have invaded the Louvre in a recent music video, Ms. Ringgold had been there three decades ago. Her “Dancing at the Louvre” quilt series from the late ’90s shows exuberant black families enjoying great works of European art. In one work she shows Picasso painting a naked black woman in front of his “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.”

“It acknowledges art history while subverting it,” Ms. Wagstaff said. “Faith Ringgold is always polemical but never one-sided.”

And this:

She is, after all, the visionary behind the painting of a race riot in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art that, in the last week, has been called a “gateway” to challenging entrenched ways of thinking about social injustice. Her large-scale work “American People Series #20: Die,” from 1967, was inspired by “Guernica,” and hangs now alongside several of Picasso’s iconic paintings.