Faith Ringgold Family of Woman Mask Series: Aunt Bessie and Aunt Edith (1974)

"My process is designed to give us 'colored folk' and women a gustatory modality of the American dream directly up. Since the facts don't exercise that too frequently, I decided to brand it up."

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"If I Tin can Anyone Tin All You Gotta Exercise Is Endeavour"

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"My women are actually flight; they are just free, totally. They take their liberation by confronting this huge masculine icon - the bridge."

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"Similar all artists and writers, I am both enriched and limited by what I know and have experienced. In other words my books and my art are based on my life'due south experience. I am, as you know, a black woman in America."

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"My ideas come from reflecting on my life and the lives of people I take known and have been in some style inspired past."

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"I had something I was trying to say and sometimes the message is an easy transmission and sometimes it's a difficult one but I dear the power of maxim it so I'm gonna do information technology whether it'due south hard or easy. Because I just beloved the idea that I can, I can say it!"

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"Being an artist is a mode of life"

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"You can't sit down around waiting for somebody else to say who you are. You demand to write information technology and paint it and do information technology. That's the ability of being an artist."

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"Freedom of speech communication is absolutely imperative. You tin can't have art of any kind without freedom of speech."

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"I wanted to tell my story. Who am I and why? - why, who, what, where, when."

10 of 16

"When I was in elementary school I used to see reproductions of Horace Pippin's 1942 painting chosen John Brownish Going to His Hanging in my textbooks. I didn't know Pippin was a blackness person. No 1 e'er told me that. I was much, much older before I plant out that there was at to the lowest degree ane black artist in my history books. Only ane. Now that didn't help me. That wasn't adept plenty for me. How come I didn't have that source of power? It is important. That's why I am a black artist. It is exactly why I say who I am."

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"I had been to the African source of my ain "classical" art forms and now I was set complimentary."

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"I am inspired past people who rise above arduousness. Like most people, I am also inspired by people who are the best they can be. Although I beloved a cute vase of flowers, a sumptuous landscape or a sunset, I will not exist moved to pigment one of these without a meaningful personal reference that is besides political."

13 of 16

"I have a responsibility to myself and to coming generations of artists. I would like to exist the one that helps them do what they desire to do. That'due south the point of beingness an artist. You tin can communicate things that you experience and see. Yous are a vocalisation. Y'all have a power to do that. You don't have to ask anyone's permission. Y'all don't need anyone's assistance. Once art is fabricated, information technology an be seen. That is a very powerful thing."

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"Your task is to tell your story. Your story has to come up out of your life, your environment, who you lot are, where you come from."

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"All over this country and the world people were listening to these blackness men. I felt called upon to create my own vision of the black experience nosotros were witnessing. I read feverishly, especially everything that James Baldwin had written on relationships betwixt blacks and whites in America. Baldwin understood, I felt, the disparity betwixt black and white people too as anyone; simply I had something to add - the visual depiction of the fashion we are and look. I wanted my paintings to express this moment I knew was history. I wanted to give my woman's point of view to this period."

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Summary of Organized religion Ringgold

Faith Ringgold took the traditional craft of quilt making (which has its roots in the slave culture of the s - pre-civil war era) and re-interpreted its function to tell stories of her life and those of others in the black community. 1 of her most famous story quilts is Tar Beach, which depicts a family unit gathered on their rooftop on a hot summertime night.

Every bit a social activist, she has used art to start and grow such organizations equally Where We At that support African American women artists. Her foundation Anyone Can Fly, is devoted to expanding the art canon to include artists of the African diaspora and to introduce the African American masters to children and adult audiences.

Accomplishments

Ringgold's early art and activism are inextricably intertwined. Her fine art confronted prejudice directly and made political statements, oft using the shock value of racial slurs inside her works to highlight the ethnic tension, political unrest, and the race riots of the 1960s. Her works provide crucial insight into perceptions of white civilisation by African Americans and vice versa.
She combines her African heritage and artistic traditions with her creative training to create paintings, multi-media soft sculptures, and "story quilts" that elevate the sewn arts to the status of art.
In her story quilt Tar Beach the term 'Tar Beach' refers to the urban rooftop itself, ordinarily used as a place on which to escape the oppressive heat of an inner metropolis without air conditioning. The adults visit with each other while the children play and sleep on their blankets. The daughter dreams of flying freely over all barriers, which is represented past the George Washington bridge in the groundwork. Ringgold consciously chooses to lend a folk-art quality to techniques in her story quilts equally a means of emphasizing their narrative importance over compositional fashion.
Her later works bargain with prejudice in a different style. No longer using confrontational imagery to attack prejudice, she subverts information technology, instead past providing immature African Americans with positive role models, re-imaging hurtful racial stereotypes every bit potent, successful, and heroic women.

Biography of Faith Ringgold

Religion Ringgold was born Faith Willi Jones and grew upwards in New York City. The artist has said of her own upbringing, "I grew up in Harlem during the Bang-up Depression. This did not mean I was poor and oppressed. Nosotros were protected from oppression and surrounded by a loving family unit."

Of import Fine art by Faith Ringgold

Progression of Art

1964

The American People Series #half dozen: Mr. Charlie

A mature, white American man of affairs is depicted in bold colors, hard edges, and apartment, simplified shapes. He holds his manus over his heart and stares ahead with a bare, merely cavalier expression. The man's vacant expression suggests someone so fixated on his own point of view that he cannot truly see or hear anyone else's experience. The gesture of his hand pressed to his chest appears to protect and excuse him from any kind of response or responsibleness. The figure, besides large to be contained within the bounds of the canvas, possesses a sort of looming presence made all the more intimidating by Ringgold's placement of him in the extreme forefront of the pic airplane. The two dimensionality of the image suggests that he represents a type of person, rather than a specific human, without human depth or feeling.

The title of the slice refers to the African-American expression "Mr. Charlie," which was used to describe a racist white man. By using primary colors for both his suit and the background, Ringgold suggests the homo has a kind of assumed privilege; he and the globe reflect ane another.

Oil on sail - Drove of the artist

1966

American People Series #16: Adult female Looking in a Mirror

The American People Serial, which Ringgold described equally "about the status of blackness and white America and the paradoxes of integration felt by many black Americans," includes twenty works. Some of the images face up racism and racial violence while others draw upon the "black power" or "black is beautiful" message that came out of the Ceremonious Rights movement of the 1960s.

Here, Ringgold depicts an African American woman seated before a window, peradventure at the moment before getting dressed, equally she appears to be wearing undergarments. The adult female looks into a handheld mirror, while in the groundwork, the window overflows with blue and dark-green geometric trees and bushes. The black branches and trunks of the plants frame the woman and repeat the curves and angles of her form. The stylized rendering evokes the work of Henri Rousseau and Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror, with their broad expanses of color heavily outlined in blackness.

The window behind the adult female shows a verdant, light-filled jungle, suggesting an African landscape, and creating the sense that the woman is at home in this setting. Its lushness complements and highlights the beauty of her image. Gazing at herself in her hand mirror demonstrates to the viewer the importance of her own self-regard over those of the male person gaze or of white society. The feminist viewpoint combined with 1 of blackness power conveys the bulletin that an African American adult female is beautiful when regarded past herself.

Oil on canvas - ACA Galleries

1967

American People Series #20: Die

Ringgold had hoped to participate in the get-go World Festival of Black Arts in 1966 merely was rebuffed past Hale Woodruff, who curated the artwork for the festival. Of Woodruff'due south criticism, Ringgold wrote: "I idea it was insulting that he idea I didn't know anything nearly rhythm or motility... I decided I'chiliad going to show him I know rhythm and move considering my teachers did teach me those aspects of paintings. They didn't teach me anything about beingness a black artist; no I learned that by myself. But they did teach me virtually movement and that sort of thing. And that's when I did Die - the biggest painting I had done up until then. ...A tribute to these guys who desire to try to tell me I don't know what I am doing."

In a fashion that Ringgold called "super realism," this work depicts the race riots of the 1960s in America as a melee of random violence. The repeating adult figures, African Americans and whites, are injured, and fighting or fleeing, while a white male child and an African American girl huddle together in the eye of the canvas, framed by the falling limbs of an African American human being and a white woman being shot. The violence contrasts with well-dressed appearances of the figures; the men in blackness pants and white shirts, the women in stylish dresses and heels.

The black and white colour of the men'due south clothing visually emphasizes that racism is the origins of the violence, and the well-dressed advent conveys that no class of social club is exempt. The painting is a kind of tour de forcefulness of Ringgold's cognition of creative manner combined with her feel of the violence generated by racism and her fear that racial violence would become endemic.

Influenced by both Picasso's Guernica and the depiction of race riots in Jacob Lawrence'southward The Migration Series, Ringgold intended to describe the racial turmoil following the Civil Rights movement. As an African American adult female, she as well wanted to answer to the societal expectations of the art world which, every bit she said, viewed fine art as "a conceptual or material process, a commodity, and non a political platform...To exist emotionally involved in art was considered to be archaic."

Michele Wallace, the art critic, has said of Die, "the painting illustrates Ringgold'due south mastery of the Western canonical strategy of expressing narrative and figurative movement by placing the same group of figures across the picture airplane in various stages of the scene. In contrast to act of reading left to correct, the artist situates the stampede-like wrestling of forms in the right side of the canvas, near spilling over to the left portion of the composition. "

Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

1969

The Blackness Light Series: Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger

The painting's title acknowledges the start moon landing in 1969. Instead of the traditional flag that the American astronauts planted on the surface of the moon, Ringgold has inscribed, "die" in blackness lettering within the stars and has cleaved and changed the stripes, so that the white stripes read "nigger."

The work is part of her Black Light Series where Ringgold said that she intended to create a "more affirmative black aesthetic." She besides noted how "white western art was focused effectually the colour white and light/dissimilarity/chiaroscuro, while African cultures in general used darker colors and emphasized color rather than tonality to create contrast." Here, she mutes the contrast of the traditional flag image; the stripes and stars are muted, as if overshadowed by racism.

Influenced by Jasper Johns' Flag, Ringgold changes his ambiguous paradigm into an explicit critique of American racism from the viewpoint of the African American customs at the end of the Civil Rights era. Explaining why she incorporated the words within the stars and stripes, Ringgold said, "It would be impossible for me to movie the American flag only as a flag, as if that is the whole story. I need to communicate my human relationship with this flag based on my experience equally a blackness woman in America."

Oil on canvas - ACA Galleries, New York Urban center

1974

Family of Woman Mask Series: Aunt Bessie and Aunt Edith

In her Family of Women Mask Series Ringgold portrayed thirty-ane women and children from her childhood. Here, Aunt Bessie and Aunt Edith are depicted wearing masks, influenced by Ringgold'southward interest in African art. Willi Posey, Ringgold'due south mother, made garments for ten of the figures in the series. Although the figures are posed without bodies beneath their garments, they both possess big, matronly bosoms. Both figures depicted here vesture colorful, beaded collars, and 1 wears a whistle around her neck, reminiscent, mayhap of the whistles she used in protest of the Whitney Museum's lack on inclusion of women artists or artists of color. The expressions of the masks are wide-eyed and open-mouthed, highlighted past white lines to emphasize their features, and are surmounted by a braided wig.

Equally Ringgold said, "Considering the mask is your face, the confront is a mask, so I'm thinking of the face as a mask considering of the way I see faces is coming from an African vision of the mask which is the matter that we bear around with us, it is our presentation, information technology's our front, information technology'south our face." Even though the women wear African-influenced textiles every bit dresses and masks, they could also represent two women on a neighborhood stoop, exchanging neighborhood gossip, and turning faces of watchfulness and commonality toward the viewer. Equally a result, the figures seem familiar, despite their exotic decoration.

Cloth sculpture - Collection of artist

1980

Echoes of Harlem

Fabricated with her mother, Willi Posey, this first quilt by Ringgold features depictions of 30 residents of Harlem. Painted in a grid system, the faces appear gazing from diverse angles set off from each other by rectangular-shaped quilt piece of work in the border. The portraits are arranged in a pattern with twelve bluish-background images in the eye and a blue-background portrait in each corner. Fourteen depictions with a gold brown background are centered within all four sides of the piece of work.

The 20^th century trend of using grid patterns to organize a composition is combined with the traditional piece work of quilt making; the overall upshot is reminiscent of screen printing, the replication of images as used past Warhol in his pop art.

With the apply of the predominantly blue background, Ringgold creates a sense of a harmonious and diversified community. Racial differences are suggested by the contrasting colors of the portrait squares. The overall effect is to acknowledge the diversity that makes up Harlem but presented as if a harmonious whole in a quilt that provides warmth and a continuation of story and heritage as it would if it were passed down through a family.

Pigment on cotton fiber - The Studio Museum in Harlem

1983

Who'due south Afraid of Aunt Jemima?

This is Ringgold'southward beginning story quilt and the first quilt project she fabricated past herself, without the help of her mother, who died the previous year. Squares forth the borders depict African American women of varying ages from all walks of life, and the squares in the center depict a variety of different people, each connected to a block of text that tell some part of Aunt Jemima'due south story. The center foursquare resembles a book title page and declares the slice a "quilt book."

As Michele Wallace, the creative person'southward girl and fine art critic, has noted, the work answers the question "what are we (as blackness women) supposed to do with our lives and how are we supposed to do it?" Ringgold contradicts a common stereotype of an African American adult female by here recasting Aunt Jemima equally a successful businesswoman and notes that the piece of work is also "a feminist statement virtually the stereotype of black women as fat. Aunt Jemima conveys the aforementioned negative connotation every bit Uncle Tom, simply because of her looks.'' By focusing on a heroic dame, Ringgold too connects to Aunt Jemima'south story her own success in overcoming the stereotypes she faced every bit an African American woman and artist.

Acrylic on canvas, dyed, painted and pieced fabric - Private Collection

1988

Tar Beach (Part I from the Woman on a Bridge serial)

Tar Beach, Ringgold's best known piece of work, is the first quilt in her Woman on a Bridge series near a young African American girl, Cassie Louise Lightfoot, growing up in Harlem. In 1991 Ringgold published Tar Beach as a children's volume for ages four to 8, and the volume was named a Caldecott Honor Volume, A New York Times Best Illustrated Book, and won the Coretta Scott Male monarch Award for Illustration and the Parents' Selection Gold Award. Featured on Reading Rainbow, widely recommended by librarians and read by countless school children, Ringgold became a household name.

The story quilt depicts a family unit spending fourth dimension outdoors on the rooftop or 'tar embankment' of their flat building. In the center image; dress are drying on a clothesline; four people are gathered effectually a tabular array playing cards, some other table has food, and Cassie and her younger brother are resting on a blanket. The background depicts the New York Urban center skyline, where Cassie is besides is shown flying over the George Washington Span.

The scene is bordered by fabric squares, many of them with floral patterns, and at the top and bottom of the quilt another border of rectangles contains text, telling the girl's story. At top left the story begins," I will always think when the stars fell effectually me and lifted me higher up the George Washington Bridge." Some other section reads, "Sleeping on Tar Beach was magical ...simply eight years old and in the third grade and I can fly. That ways I am free to go wherever I want to for the residue of my life."

Ringgold's use of color and the repeating floral motif creates a garden-similar border and a sense of familial warmth. Past painting decorative embellishments onto her piecework with the same color she has subtly unified the many and varied color blocks used to create the border. Past adopting a 'naive' or 'folk' technique that avoids perspective and shading, Ringgold suggests that the experience depicted in the work is being expressed directly and freely, from inside the internal life of her graphic symbol. Ringgold drew upon her ain experience growing up to create the character, merely also wanted to convey an empowering feminist message. Equally she said of the series, "My women are actually flying; they are just gratuitous, totally. They have their liberation by against this huge masculine icon - the bridge."

Acrylic on sheet, bordered with printed, painted, quilted, and pieced cloth - The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

1986

Change: Religion Ringgold's Over 100 Pounds Weight Loss Operation Story Quilt

Rectangular blocks of text describe Ringgold'due south personal and political relationship to food, the social expectations of weight and torso image in women, and her undertaking an most yearlong weight loss plan. In alternating rectangles, a collage of black and white images include photos of Ringgold at different ages, family photos, and images of women in terms of body image and weight. Overlaying the quilt rectangles is a quilt square design, which creates an x shape across each block of text or image.

Ringgold has said "The reason why I began making quilts is considering I wrote my autobiography in 1980 and couldn't get it published, because I wanted to tell my story and my story didn't appear to be advisable for African-American women, that's what I think, and that really made me so aroused." She connected telling that story in Change ii (1988) and Change 3 (1989).

The profusion of images and texts, personal and political, individual and cultural, are meant to brand the viewer aware of the societal messages that are brought to bear on the individual woman who is influenced by them and tries to live up to them. Yet the x shape drawn across each block of text or image seems to cross out the message each block contains, every bit if suggesting that trying to follow each message has resulted in failure, simply as a dieter may try nutrition after nutrition without success. Ringgold connects her own struggle with weight loss with the feminist issue of self-image and societal expectations.

Photo carving on silk - Private Collection

1991

Analogy 2: The French Collection Function I, #4, The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles

In 1959 after earning her Main's degree in Fine Art, Ringgold went to Europe to written report the work of the masters, especially the work of the Impressionists and Cubists. She was struck by the absence of people of color except every bit models or subjects, and years afterwards in The French Drove began looking at the tradition of European art from the viewpoint of an African American creative person.

A group of noted African American women from history, seated in a field of sunflowers, is depicted creating a quilt of sunflowers. The setting in the background is Arles, best known for the time that Vincent Van Gogh spent at that place and the paintings he produced. The women depicted are Madam Walker, Sojourner Truth, Ida Wells, Fannie Lou Hammer, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Ella Baker. To the correct of the women stands Vincent van Gogh, holding a vase of sunflowers, reminiscent of the vii still lifes with sunflowers he painted while at Arles. Here, he offers his sunflowers as a sign of respect and appreciation to these legendary women.

Ringgold represents the tradition of African-American quilt making as a collective effort, passed downwards through the generations of women in her family, and juxtaposes it with the tradition of the solitary male European painter, represented here by Van Gogh. The quilt they are making with its sunflowers is in harmony with the natural globe that surrounds them.

Writing in the New York Times, the critic Roberta Smith noted, "This tribute to female solidarity and individual struggle gets its existent force from Ms. Ringgold'south contrasting depictions of the quilted sunflowers and the painted sunflower field, which make their ain political signal in purely visual terms. In short, the artist juxtaposes the lonely, traditionally male activity of painting with the collective, traditionally female one of quilting, while fusing their different visual effects into a unmarried work of art."

Acrylic on canvas, pieced cloth border - Private Collection

2000

From the Coming to Jones Road Series: Nether a Claret Cherry Sky

In 1999 Ringgold began working on the Coming to Jones Road Series, which focused on the escape of slaves to the due north via the Cloak-and-dagger Railroad. Here she combines a contemporary artistic practise, screen-press with a story quilt that in image and text conveys the story of the slaves' flight to freedom. The utilize of vivid, vibrant colors and apartment, simplified shapes are both reminiscent of the work of Henri Matisse. The border is tie-dyed piecework with an outer edge of zebra striped material.

In the primal image a large number of African-American slaves, men, women, and children, some of them carrying burdens, are making their way from the red foreground into the forest of alpine green trees with blue trunks and, ultimately to the house on Jones Road. Only right of the upper center of the image, the sun can be seen. The image is bordered with text carrying the story.

The black figures on the cerise ground and below a red heaven suggest the difficult struggle for freedom in a world saturated with racial violence. The small xanthous sun is the merely vivid spot in the image, its yellow highlighted by the yellow sunbursts of the border. Ringgold explained her creative intention; "I have tried to couple the beauty of this identify with the harsh realities of its racist history to create a freedom serial that turns all of the ugliness of spirit, by and present into something livable."

Many of the works in this series include landscapes. In 1992, Ringgold moved with her husband, Burdette from Harlem to Englewood, New Jersey, purchasing a home on Jones Road, proverb "I came over here and landed on Jones Road - you lot know my maiden proper noun is Jones, so I but felt that this was where I was supposed to exist - and bought this house." Wanting to build a studio behind the new domicile, notwithstanding, she met with a great deal of resistance from the predominantly white neighborhood, which fought the proposal, a reaction that Ringgold felt reflected racial prejudice. She responded to the experience past turning her artistic efforts toward capturing the area's natural beauty and congenital a garden. She said, "art is a healer and the sheer beauty of living in a garden amidst trees, plants, and flowers has inspired me to look abroad from my neighbors' unfolded animosity toward me and focus my attention on the stalwart traditions of black people who had come to New Jersey centuries before me." By creating Jones Road their eventual destination equally her own domicile, Ringgold is able to enfold herself inside the story too as the history.

Silkscreen on canvas with pieced edge - Pasadena City College, Pasadena, CA

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Useful Resources on Faith Ringgold

Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Laurentia McIntosh, PhD

"Faith Ringgold Artist Overview and Analysis". [Cyberspace]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added past Laurentia McIntosh, PhD
Available from:
Start published on 07 May 2017. Updated and modified regularly
[Accessed ]

valeriooverave.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/ringgold-faith/