Yesterday and today

Fridman Gallery is honored to present Dindga McCannon’s second solo exhibition, Yesterday and today, which brings together, for the first time, her groundbreaking mixed-media quilts, paintings, and prints, spanning the 1970s to the present day. On her 18th birthday, Dindga went to see a concert in Tompkins Square Park, where she encountered Sunrise, a jazz group whose performance became a kind of epiphany. That encounter shaped the course of her life and artistic process, cementing music as inseparable from her visual language. Her works emerge intuitively and are in many ways improvised akin to a jazz riff. Born and raised in Harlem and the Bronx, Dindga came of age as an artist and young mother during the rise of the civil rights movement. She began her career studying with Jacob Lawrence, Charles Alston, Richard Mayhew, and Al Loving at the Art Students League of New York and with Robert Blackburn at his eponymous Printmaking Workshop. Dindga went on to become a pillar of the influential art collective Weusi, and co-founded, in 1971, with Faith Ringgold and Kay Brown, Where We At, the first African-American women artist collective. Throughout her career, Dindga created space for her own artistic exploration and a support network for generations of Black artists. Dindga’s pioneering implementation of non-traditional materials, including personal objects, photographs, and ephemera connect the viewer with her personal history, community, and ancestry. She often focuses on the stories of women—iconic public figures, unknown heroines, family, and friends who shape her vibrant universe.