“Reimagining the world we want to live in takes a lot of forethought and creativity,” Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter says in “Paint Me a Road Out of Here,” describing her admiration for Faith Ringgold’s “For the Women’s House,” a painting which was first installed at the New York Correctional Facility for Women in the 1970s, operating as a beacon of light in the facility when it presented proud women in a variety of different professional uniforms for jobs that they weren’t legally permitted to hold at the time in one part of the country or another. It could be seen as an unenviably tall task ahead for Baxter in being commissioned to create a contemporary work to hold the same space as “For the Women’s House,” after the Ringgold’s mural is moved to the Brooklyn Museum at the artist’s behest, but when the Philadelphia-born multidisciplinary artist had to see her life as its own blank canvas after being incarcerated herself, the brushstrokes would seem to come effortlessly.
“Paint Me A Road Out of Here” doesn’t flow quite as naturally, but nonetheless serves as a stirring consideration of the purpose of art in general as a force of liberation. It turns out when you have a pair of artists that have defy convention, they can be hard to compare and while director Catherine Gund attempts to align Baxter and Ringgold’s journeys to the art they eventually make, they are a bit too divergent to tame into a easy dialogue with one another. In some ways, the film opens where it could also end in drawing a direct parallel between Ringgold and Baxter, who is living proof of the inspiration that Ringgold sought to provide as she prepares a show of her own at the Brooklyn Museum where “For the Women’s House” will soon have its permanent home. While Ringgold can be seen in 1971 beckoned by those she met behind bars to present a future for them, Baxter appears free to do what she wants in the art world now, having found a way to express herself artistically and just as notably the network of support to do so as she parlayed a start in rap music into a variety of multimedia art. However, that introduction leaves less of a straightforward road ahead to filling out an 86-minute running time.
Yet Gund does have an ace in the hole when the afterlife of “For the Women’s House” simply as a physical object is a fascinating one, becoming a great subject of debate from the mid-1990s on as the female prison population in New York was moved to a different location, the Rose M. Singer Center, and the painting stayed behind at a male-populated prison where it was quite literally whitewashed after a while. Although Ringgold and Baxter are presented as fully formed artists in their personal voice almost from the jump, the fight to restore the painting to its former glory and presented in a public space where it can be most resonant shines a light on how difficult it is to maintain a voice as much as to break through a cultural cacophony in the first place.
The occasion of “For the Women’s House” being unveiled again at the Brooklyn Museum does open up a literal conversation as much as a figurative one between Ringgold, blessedly caught on camera before her passing last spring at 93 years old, and Baxter, and when the two have very different practices from one another — like Baxter, Ringgold hardly restricted herself formally when she was as skilled at needlepoint as she was with a paintbrush, but clearly comes from a different temperament — it doesn’t go smoothly, but nonetheless yields more than a few gems. As Baxter is obliged to ask a modern master in Ringgold as any younger artist would, “How did you balance it all?” as far as her life and her work, Ringgold shrugs, “I wasn’t being offered opportunities,” leaving her more idle time than she would’ve liked to have had and when “Paint Me A Road Out of Here” does such an admirable job at presenting the towering career Ringgold built in defiance of a system that wasn’t designed for her, the way resistance has a way of breeding creativity comes through loud and clear.
“Paint Me a Road Out of Here” opens in New York at Film Forum on February 7th. A full list of future screenings and dates is here.