Further explore the exhibition’s themes of semi-visibility through a slow-looking exercise related to this work.

Transcript
Narrator: "Black Light #3.2: Invisible Woman #1" was painted in 1968. It demonstrates artist Faith Ringgold’s commitment to advancing Black aesthetics through the color palette, design, and even the naming of the works in the series it is part of. At 2 1/2 feet tall and 2 feet wide, this painting features three-quarters of a Black woman’s face. Her face and hair are segmented by color blocks in earthy tones of burnt umber, brown, mauve, and slate blue, over a smoky gray background. Rather than being a realistic portrait, the face is wide, round, and flat, with large eyes reminiscent of a West African mask. While the portrait is bordered by white canvas, it is notable that the painting itself contains no white, eschewing a white European aesthetic by using a black-base pigment. A segment of gray paint from the background bleeds out of the portrait and onto the white border by the left side of her neck. It turns from a rich slate blue to a lackluster tan when it hits the white canvas.

Some of the color blocks of the woman’s face appear almost as if they are cutouts, not meeting the edges of the adjoining blocks precisely. A soft gray peeks through the gaps. In other sections, the blocks overlap, creating an additive effect where the color becomes rich and vibrant. Where burnt umber meets brown at the top outer edge of her left eye, it turns rusty red; where mauve meets brown, it creates a forest-green seam down her forehead to the tip of her nose. A narrow line of paint drips are found all down this seam dripping toward the left. The left side of her forehead and nose are brown; the right side, a streaked mauve with brown underneath it. Her left cheek and chin are burnt umber; and the right, gray. Her left neck is the same mauve of her right forehead, and the right side of her neck continues with the same gray of that cheek. Her left eye, lips, and a large hoop earring on the left are variations on smoky gray.

The series’ title, "Black Light Series," where “black” and “light” are separate words, is a reference to a black light, which is an ultraviolet light bulb that is not used for illumination because it emits very little visible light. Rather, it can reveal designs or substances that are invisible under sunlight or light from everyday light bulbs but that are visible on the ultraviolet end of the light spectrum. In the context of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements, the Black woman in the painting, who might otherwise be politically invisible, is rendered in a serene yet celebratory way when the light of Black culture and Black artistry are shined on her.

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