Film Forum will present the US theatrical premiere of Catherine Gund’s PAINT ME A ROAD OUT OF HERE, opening on Friday, February 7.

A great painting tells a compelling story. When its provenance deepens that story, it becomes an extraordinary and impactful performance piece. Documentarian and activist Catherine Gund tracks the labyrinthine ordeal borne by Faith Ringgold’s 1971 painting “For the Women’s House” — originally created for the women incarcerated on Rikers Island, then relegated to mishandling, defacing, and deep storage. 

Artist and rapper Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, herself formerly incarcerated and commissioned to create a new work for the Rikers women, bands together with Ringgold, politicians, artists, philanthropists, and corrections officers against Kafkaesque bureaucracy to liberate the original painting from Rikers and, more profoundly, Black women from mass incarceration. 

“Few artists have kept as many balls in the air as long as Faith Ringgold,” the New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote in 2013, reviewing an exhibition of her work at ACA Galleries in Manhattan. “She has spent more than five decades juggling message and form, high and low, art and craft, inspirational narrative and quiet or not so quiet fury about racial and sexual inequality.”

Catherine Gund is an Emmy-nominated and Oscar-shortlisted producer, director, writer, and activist. Her media work focuses on strategic and sustainable social transformation, arts and culture, HIV/AIDS and racial, reproductive and environmental justice. Her films include MEANWHILE, ANGOLA DO YOU HEAR US? VOICES FROM A PLANTATION PRISON, PRIMERA, AGGIE, CHAVELA, and BORN TO FLY. The latter three titles had their theatrical premieres at Film Forum.