Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Rest In Peace and Power, Ms. Faith Ringgold

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

We begin today with a celebration of the life of noted African American artist Faith Ringgold, who passed away yesterday at her home in Englewood, N.J. at the age of 93.

Margalit Fox/The New York Times

For more than a half-century, Ms. Ringgold explored themes of race, gender, class, family and community through a vast array of media, among them painting, sculpture, mask- and doll-making, textiles and performance art. She was also a longtime advocate of bringing the work of Black people and women into the collections of major American museums.

Ms. Ringgold’s art, which was often rooted in her own experience, has been exhibited at the White House and in museums and galleries around the world. It is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the American Craft Museum in New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and other institutions.

For Ms. Ringgold, as her work and many interviews made plain, art and activism were a seamless, if sometimes quilted, whole. Classically trained as a painter and sculptor, she began producing political paintings in the 1960s and ’70s that explored the highly charged subjects of relations between Black and white people, and between men and women, in America.

Yes, there’s a lot of bad, mad, and sad news and punditry below the fold. I wanted to begin today with a celebration and a smile.