Art is a family affair for Faith Ringgold. In a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, she proves her excellence in every avenue of her prolific practice: painting, mixed media sculpting, and writing to name a few. Yet, it is when she collaborates with her family—her mother Madame Willi Posey, an artist in her own right, and her two daughters Michele and Barbara Faith Wallace—that Ringgold’s narratives really come to life.

Slave Rape #1, Slave Rape #2, Slave Rape #3. Courtesy of the artist and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London

Ringgold’s works are inextricable from her experiences as a Black woman in the U.S.—raised by a Black woman and having raised Black women of her own. Painted atop canvases with intricate patchwork borders constructed by her mother, Ringgold’s Slave Rape series places her and her daughters within a harrowing history of chattel slavery. Generations of women in her family are trapped in a singular moment, transcending temporality together. Slave Rape #1: Fear Will Make You Weak depicts one of her daughters frozen in sheer terror. Her widened brown irises, accentuated by their cerulean blue sclera, match her gaping expression. Her arms flail out of the painting’s perimeter, exposing her nude breasts and torso as she emerges out of unruly shrubbery. Slave Rape #2: Run You Might Get Away produces a similarly haunting effect: Ringgold paints her second daughter attempting to flee an identical scenery. Your eyes are met with another panicked pair of unnaturally blue eyes. Suddenly you are witness to an all-too-familiar trauma. A self-portrait in Slave Rape #3: Fight to Save Your Life completes Ringgold’s series as she caresses her pregnant belly while gripping a hatchet in her other hand. She stares straight ahead, implicating your gaze as you inexorably scan her naked figure. She may have been painting long after the abolitionist movement, but the psychological traumas of institutionalized sexual violence run rampant in the bodies of contemporary Black women.

Curator Jack Schneider and students at Faith Ringgold: American People, photograph by Christine Mehring.

The Slave Rape series embodies Ringgold’s overt desire to facilitate social commentary through her artwork. Hung as a triptych, the series strikes deeply personal. By placing the three women next to one another, Ringgold refuses to separate herself from the inevitable realities her identity affords her: both in generations prior and, through motherhood, in those that come next. This sentiment is only further compounded by a literal entrenchment of her own family within each unsettling scene she paints. Her daughters attempt to escape a system designed to exploit them, all the while watching their own mother prepare to defend herself from harm’s way. Ringgold’s Slave Rape series is an act of resistance, emboldened by biographical references within her representation of collective trauma. The women in front of you are contemporary subjects–deeply personal and identifiable–forcing you to reckon with a history that refuses to fade into the past. One thing is clear for Black women: even in the present, we must fight back or die trying.

Students visiting Faith Ringgold: American People, photograph by Christine Mehring.

Today, the Slave Rape series carries even greater weight; racial injustice and reproductive rights remain at the forefront of the U.S. political landscape. The triptych propels a critical confrontation with the insidious histories that continue to fuel disparities ingrained into our social fabric. But change does not come overnight. Until then, Ringgold collaborates with her family to channel faith toward a better future—long-awaited for Black people around the world.

Lydia Dimsu