Painting and protest. Art and activism. Singular style; multidisciplinary approach.
The exhibit at the New Museum of works by Faith Ringgold heralds all of this and more. It encompasses three floors and six decades of her paintings, multimedia story quilts, and craft-based soft sculptures. That it is the first full retrospective of the 90-year old artist’s work in her hometown of New York City is regrettable if not shameful. But seeing it all together now is glorious, intriguing, and deeply satisfying.
Can a quilt be searingly confessional? Yes, when done by Faith Ringgold. She combines colorful textile squares with photos reproduced on cloth, surrounded by hand-painted words that reveal the personal and universal. The pieces invite a conversation akin to a traditional call and response.
The American People series marks her transition from impressionism to a more political direction. Her figurative style of reproducing human forms – facial features shadowed with tones of blue and muted greens, depicted with American flags streaked and spattered with blood – challenges historical concepts of nation and our places within it, as well as our relation to each other in ways that are still highly relevant.
Her 100lb Weight Loss quilts weave together the burdens and delights of food, hunger, family, emotions, and expectations. The Bitter Nest series captures the impact of 20th-century social change on the African American experience. The 12 quilts in The French Collection reflect on being a young African-ancestored woman creative in the 1920s through a fictional character (some say Ringgold’s alter ego) named Willia Marie, juxtaposed with the canon of iconic 18th and 19th-century European male painters. The Tar Beach series pays homage to her childhood rooftop flights of fancy above the buildings and bridges of New York City.
The feminist and racial activism she displayed in her artwork was challenged in the larger art world. A few years ago, I presented a visual art exhibit, curated by Black Art In America as part of the annual March on Washington Film Festival. It featured works by members of the Spiral Group. Renowned African American artists Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, Richard Mayhew, Charles Alston, and others, formed the collective to respond to the call to activism of the civil rights movement, particularly the 1963 March on Washington.
At the New Museum exhibit I learned that Ringgold, whose work was radically political, was denied membership in the Group of “old Black Man’s art.” Yet few of the names associated with the Spiral Group resound as loudly today as hers.
Recently a question was posed, “Is the mission of examining civil rights and racial equality an African American Experience or the American Experience?” The dichotomy reflects a faulty premise. Are the two experiences mutually exclusive? What is the American Experience separate from African Americans?
The question belies the subtle hierarchy in the false narrative of color identity that undergirds the dominant culture. It is that vestige of privilege where it is presumed that American means “white” and everyone else is “other.”
With every stitch and brushstroke, Ringgold tells a different story. By incorporating the crafts, she elevates them to high art. The hand-painted prose on her quilts marries narration and literature with the visual arts. Drawing on traditional forms of global cultural expression – Yoruba egungun masks, fabric borders from Tibetan thangkas, European brocade, tapestry, and lace to name a few – she forces us to see the richness and equal worth in all of our ethnic expressions.
Through her aesthetics and politics, she blazed a trail of maximum resistance and boundary-breaking, demonstrating singular courage and the vital role of the individual as a multidimensional being.
By using her body of work to both stand for her beliefs and make a stand in the public square, she breathes life into the tenets of democracy upon which this country rests. Throughout her lifetime, Faith Ringgold has said the American People are all of it.
