Her “Dancing at the Louvre” quilt series from the late ’90s shows exuberant black families enjoying great works of European art. Ringgold had been there three decades ago. 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. 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.” “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. In addition, a Ringgold work with text, “Street Story Quilt” (1985), will be on view at the 150th anniversary show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art when it reopens. A crowd-pleasing retrospective at London’s Serpentine Galleries in 2019 followed The Times of London called it “bright, beautiful and brutal” and “a gorgeous gut punch.” In the coming months, there will be shows at the Bildmuseet in Sweden and at Glenstone, the contemporary art museum outside of Washington, D.C. The show traveled widely, including to Brooklyn.

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. 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. Then, with the death of George Floyd on May 25, she found herself starting to emerge from her haze and to think more clearly, beginning to visualize how to get her thoughts down. “I’ve been waiting for the inspiration that can help me inspire others.” “I’m just keeping my eyes wide open so I can find a point of view on all this,” she said with a sigh. Ringgold, a former art teacher, mused, while her two grown daughters hovered and MSNBC played.

“The children aren’t in school, and all over the world, the same situation,” Ms.

“I’m trying to make sense of things, bring some light to the situation,” she said a few weeks ago, when the distraction of the news kept her from climbing the stairs to the beautiful and airy studio she had built when she moved from Harlem 30 years ago. But the provocative Harlem-born artist - who has confronted race relations in this country from every angle, led protests to diversify museums decades ago, and even went to jail for an exhibition she organized - has had no reference point for the pandemic keeping her in lockdown and creatively paralyzed in her home in this leafy suburb for much of the spring. Faith Ringgold has seen plenty of shake-ups and strange moments in her 89 well-traveled years.

Faith ringgold's tar beach