"Faith Ringgold"
1977
oil on canvas
48 x 36 in

From Blake Gopnik in the Washington Post:

"A few of Neel's paintings deliberately highlight the gap between well-mannered style and radical subject. In a famous self-portrait from 1980, the elderly artist posed herself on an elegant, bourgeois armchair striped in blue and white -- after removing all her clothes. Society portraits that feature chairs like this are not supposed to also show an active old woman, paintbrush in hand, sitting in them nude, all sagging breasts and flabby stomach. But Neel insists they should.
Even more interesting, however, than the pictures that make a point of contrasting subject and style are those that don't. In Neel's portrait of Ringgold, the contrast is only hinted at: She's in that same sedate blue-and-white chair -- it's one of Neel's favorite studio props, rather than a real feature of her sitters' own environments -- but her way-out ethnic clothes tell you that she is used to sitting in less staid surroundings. Ditto for Garrard, who's shown in that establishment chair, too, but in a winter coat and hat and scarf, as though she's allowed to perch there for only a moment. The radical black artist, the pioneering feminist historian of art, are shown occupying space -- domestic, artistic, social -- that was designed for other kinds of people. Their portraits subvert the "natural" order of things, normally upheld by pictures painted the way Neel's are."

"Self-Portrait"
1980
54 x 40"