Art Is the Open Hand of a Man Reaching for His Mother

"My process is designed to give us 'colored folk' and women a taste of the American dream straight upwardly. Since the facts don't do that too often, I decided to make information technology up."

1 of 16

"If 1 Can Anyone Can All You Gotta Do Is Try"

2 of 16

"My women are actually flying; they are just free, totally. They take their liberation past against this huge masculine icon - the span."

3 of 16

"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 fine art are based on my life's experience. I am, as y'all know, a black woman in America."

4 of 16

"My ideas come up from reflecting on my life and the lives of people I have known and have been in some way inspired by."

v of 16

"I had something I was trying to say and sometimes the message is an easy transmission and sometimes information technology's a hard one just I beloved the ability of maxim information technology so I'm gonna do it whether it'southward hard or like shooting fish in a barrel. Because I just beloved the idea that I tin, I can say it!"

6 of sixteen

"Existence an artist is a way of life"

vii of 16

"Yous tin can't sit around waiting for somebody else to say who you are. You need to write it and pigment it and practice it. That's the ability of beingness an artist."

viii of 16

"Freedom of oral communication is absolutely imperative. You can't accept art of whatsoever kind without freedom of speech."

9 of 16

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

x of 16

"When I was in elementary school I used to see reproductions of Horace Pippin's 1942 painting called John Dark-brown Going to His Hanging in my textbooks. I didn't know Pippin was a black person. No one e'er told me that. I was much, much older before I found out that there was at least ane black artist in my history books. Simply one. Now that didn't help me. That wasn't good enough for me. How come up I didn't have that source of power? It is important. That's why I am a black creative person. It is exactly why I say who I am."

11 of 16

"I had been to the African source of my own "classical" art forms and now I was fix gratuitous."

12 of 16

"I am inspired past people who rise above adversity. Like well-nigh people, I am also inspired by people who are the best they tin be. Although I love a beautiful vase of flowers, a sumptuous mural or a dusk, I will non be moved to pigment ane of these without a meaningful personal reference that is as well political."

13 of xvi

"I have a responsibility to myself and to coming generations of artists. I would similar to exist the one that helps them do what they want to do. That'south the point of being an artist. You can communicate things that you feel and run across. You are a voice. You take a power to practise that. You don't accept to ask anyone's permission. You don't need anyone's aid. Once art is made, it an be seen. That is a very powerful affair."

14 of 16

"Your job is to tell your story. Your story has to come up out of your life, your environs, who yous are, where yous come from."

15 of 16

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

sixteen of sixteen

Summary of Organized religion Ringgold

Religion Ringgold took the traditional craft of quilt making (which has its roots in the slave civilization of the southward - pre-civil war era) and re-interpreted its role to tell stories of her life and those of others in the black community. One of her most famous story quilts is Tar Beach, which depicts a family gathered on their rooftop on a hot summer night.

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

Accomplishments

Ringgold'south early art and activism are inextricably intertwined. Her art confronted prejudice directly and made political statements, oft using the stupor value of racial slurs within 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 culture 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 fine art.
In her story quilt Tar Beach the term 'Tar Embankment' refers to the urban rooftop itself, commonly used as a place on which to escape the oppressive heat of an inner city without air workout. The adults visit with each other while the children play and sleep on their blankets. The daughter dreams of flight freely over all barriers, which is represented by the George Washington bridge in the background. Ringgold consciously chooses to lend a folk-art quality to techniques in her story quilts as a means of emphasizing their narrative importance over compositional way.
Her afterwards works deal with prejudice in a different manner. No longer using confrontational imagery to attack prejudice, she subverts it, instead past providing young African Americans with positive function models, re-imaging hurtful racial stereotypes as stiff, successful, and heroic women.

Biography of Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold was built-in Faith Willi Jones and grew up in New York Urban center. The artist has said of her ain upbringing, "I grew up in Harlem during the Cracking Depression. This did non mean I was poor and oppressed. Nosotros were protected from oppression and surrounded by a loving family."

Of import Art past Faith Ringgold

Progression of Art

1964

The American People Series #vi: Mr. Charlie

A mature, white American businessman is depicted in bold colors, hard edges, and apartment, simplified shapes. He holds his mitt over his heart and stares ahead with a blank, merely condescending expression. The man's vacant expression suggests someone and so fixated on his own point of view that he cannot truly encounter or hear anyone else'due south experience. The gesture of his mitt pressed to his chest appears to protect and excuse him from any kind of response or responsibility. The figure, too large to be contained within the bounds of the canvas, possesses a sort of looming presence made all the more than intimidating by Ringgold'due south placement of him in the extreme forefront of the moving-picture show aeroplane. The two dimensionality of the epitome suggests that he represents a type of person, rather than a specific man, without human depth or feeling.

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

Oil on canvass - Drove of the artist

1966

American People Serial #xvi: Woman Looking in a Mirror

The American People Series, which Ringgold described equally "about the condition of black and white America and the paradoxes of integration felt by many black Americans," includes 20 works. Some of the images face up racism and racial violence while others draw upon the "blackness ability" 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, perchance at the moment before getting dressed, every bit she appears to be wearing undergarments. The woman looks into a handheld mirror, while in the background, the window overflows with blue and green geometric trees and bushes. The blackness branches and trunks of the plants frame the woman and echo the curves and angles of her form. The stylized rendering evokes the work of Henri Rousseau and Picasso's Girl Earlier a Mirror, with their wide expanses of colour heavily outlined in black.

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

Oil on sail - ACA Galleries

1967

American People Series #20: Die

Ringgold had hoped to participate in the first Earth Festival of Blackness Arts in 1966 but was rebuffed by Hale Woodruff, who curated the artwork for the festival. Of Woodruff's criticism, Ringgold wrote: "I thought it was insulting that he thought I didn't know anything about rhythm or movement... I decided I'1000 going to show him I know rhythm and motion because my teachers did teach me those aspects of paintings. They didn't teach me annihilation nearly existence a black artist; no I learned that past myself. Only they did teach me about 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 want to attempt 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 center of the canvas, framed by the falling limbs of an African American man and a white woman existence shot. The violence contrasts with well-dressed appearances of the figures; the men in black pants and white shirts, the women in stylish dresses and heels.

The black and white color of the men'south vesture visually emphasizes that racism is the origins of the violence, and the well-dressed appearance conveys that no class of society is exempt. The painting is a kind of tour de forcefulness of Ringgold's knowledge of artistic mode combined with her experience of the violence generated by racism and her fear that racial violence would become owned.

Influenced by both Picasso'southward Guernica and the delineation of race riots in Jacob Lawrence'southward The Migration Series, Ringgold intended to depict the racial turmoil following the Civil Rights move. As an African American adult female, she too wanted to respond to the societal expectations of the fine art world which, every bit she said, viewed art as "a conceptual or material process, a article, and not a political platform...To be emotionally involved in art was considered to be primitive."

Michele Wallace, the art critic, has said of Die, "the painting illustrates Ringgold's mastery of the Western canonical strategy of expressing narrative and figurative motility by placing the same grouping of figures beyond the picture aeroplane in various stages of the scene. In dissimilarity to act of reading left to right, the artist situates the stampede-similar wrestling of forms in the right side of the canvas, almost spilling over to the left portion of the composition. "

Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Fine art, New York

1969

The Blackness Low-cal Series: Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger

The painting's title acknowledges the first 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 black lettering within the stars and has cleaved and changed the stripes, and so that the white stripes read "nigger."

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

Influenced by Jasper Johns' Flag, Ringgold changes his ambiguous prototype into an explicit critique of American racism from the viewpoint of the African American community at the stop of the Ceremonious Rights era. Explaining why she incorporated the words within the stars and stripes, Ringgold said, "It would be impossible for me to picture the American flag but every bit a flag, equally if that is the whole story. I need to communicate my relationship with this flag based on my feel equally a blackness woman in America."

Oil on canvas - ACA Galleries, New York City

1974

Family unit of Woman Mask Serial: Aunt Bessie and Aunt Edith

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

As Ringgold said, "Considering the mask is your face, the face is a mask, so I'yard thinking of the face as a mask because of the way I run across faces is coming from an African vision of the mask which is the thing that nosotros comport effectually with united states, it is our presentation, information technology's our front end, it'due south our face." Even though the women wear African-influenced textiles as dresses and masks, they could also represent 2 women on a neighborhood stoop, exchanging neighborhood gossip, and turning faces of watchfulness and commonality toward the viewer. As a event, the figures seem familiar, despite their exotic ornamentation.

Cloth sculpture - Collection of artist

1980

Echoes of Harlem

Made with her female parent, Willi Posey, this first quilt past Ringgold features depictions of 30 residents of Harlem. Painted in a grid system, the faces appear gazing from various angles set off from each other by rectangular-shaped quilt 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 golden brown groundwork are centered within all iv sides of the 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 effect is reminiscent of screen printing, the replication of images as used by Warhol in his popular art.

With the use of the predominantly bluish 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 result is to admit the multifariousness that makes upwardly Harlem merely presented as if a harmonious whole in a quilt that provides warmth and a continuation of story and heritage as information technology would if it were passed downwardly through a family.

Paint on cotton - The Studio Museum in Harlem

1983

Who's Agape of Aunt Jemima?

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

As Michele Wallace, the artist's daughter and fine art critic, has noted, the work answers the question "what are we (as black women) supposed to do with our lives and how are we supposed to exercise it?" Ringgold contradicts a common stereotype of an African American adult female by here recasting Aunt Jemima as a successful baron and notes that the work is also "a feminist statement about the stereotype of black women as fat. Aunt Jemima conveys the same negative connotation as Uncle Tom, simply because of her looks.'' By focusing on a heroic matriarch, Ringgold besides connects to Aunt Jemima's story her own success in overcoming the stereotypes she faced as an African American adult female and artist.

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

1988

Tar Beach (Function I from the Woman on a Bridge series)

Tar Embankment, Ringgold's best known work, is the first quilt in her Woman on a Bridge serial about a young African American girl, Cassie Louise Lightfoot, growing up in Harlem. In 1991 Ringgold published Tar Beach as a children'south book for ages four to eight, and the book was named a Caldecott Award Volume, A New York Times Best Illustrated Volume, and won the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration and the Parents' Choice Aureate Award. Featured on Reading Rainbow, widely recommended by librarians and read by countless school children, Ringgold became a household proper noun.

The story quilt depicts a family spending time outdoors on the rooftop or 'tar embankment' of their apartment building. In the center paradigm; dress are drying on a clothesline; four people are gathered effectually a table playing cards, some other table has food, and Cassie and her younger brother are resting on a blanket. The background depicts the New York City skyline, where Cassie is also is shown flight over the George Washington Bridge.

The scene is bordered by fabric squares, many of them with floral patterns, and at the pinnacle and lesser of the quilt another border of rectangles contains text, telling the girl's story. At elevation left the story begins," I will e'er remember when the stars barbarous around me and lifted me higher up the George Washington Span." Another section reads, "Sleeping on Tar Embankment was magical ...only eight years sometime and in the third class and I tin fly. That ways I am free to become wherever I want to for the rest of my life."

Ringgold's utilise of color and the repeating floral motif creates a garden-like border and a sense of familial warmth. By painting decorative embellishments onto her piecework with the aforementioned color she has subtly unified the many and varied color blocks used to create the edge. Past adopting a 'naive' or 'folk' technique that avoids perspective and shading, Ringgold suggests that the experience depicted in the piece of work is existence expressed direct and freely, from within the internal life of her character. Ringgold drew upon her own experience growing up to create the character, simply also wanted to convey an empowering feminist message. As she said of the serial, "My women are really flying; they are just free, totally. They take their liberation by confronting this huge masculine icon - the bridge."

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

1986

Modify: Religion Ringgold'south Over 100 Pounds Weight Loss Operation Story Quilt

Rectangular blocks of text describe Ringgold's personal and political human relationship to food, the social expectations of weight and body image in women, and her undertaking an near yearlong weight loss program. In alternate rectangles, a collage of black and white images include photos of Ringgold at unlike ages, family photos, and images of women in terms of trunk image and weight. Overlaying the quilt rectangles is a quilt square pattern, which creates an x shape across each block of text or image.

Ringgold has said "The reason why I began making quilts is because 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 exist appropriate for African-American women, that's what I retrieve, and that really made me and then angry." She continued telling that story in Change 2 (1988) and Modify three (1989).

The profusion of images and texts, personal and political, individual and cultural, are meant to make the viewer aware of the societal messages that are brought to affect the private woman who is influenced by them and tries to live up to them. Yet the x shape drawn beyond each block of text or paradigm seems to cross out the message each block contains, as if suggesting that trying to follow each message has resulted in failure, merely equally a dieter may endeavor diet afterwards diet without success. Ringgold connects her own struggle with weight loss with the feminist issue of self-image and societal expectations.

Photograph etching on silk - Private Collection

1991

Illustration 2: The French Collection Part I, #4, The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles

In 1959 after earning her Master's degree in Fine art, Ringgold went to Europe to study the work of the masters, particularly the work of the Impressionists and Cubists. She was struck by the absenteeism of people of color except as models or subjects, and years later in The French Collection began looking at the tradition of European art from the viewpoint of an African American artist.

A grouping 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, all-time known for the time that Vincent Van Gogh spent in that location 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 Bakery. To the right of the women stands Vincent van Gogh, property a vase of sunflowers, reminiscent of the vii notwithstanding 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 down through the generations of women in her family unit, and juxtaposes it with the tradition of the solitary male person European painter, represented hither past Van Gogh. The quilt they are making with its sunflowers is in harmony with the natural earth that surrounds them.

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

Acrylic on canvas, pieced fabric border - Private Collection

2000

From the Coming to Jones Road Series: Under a Claret Blood-red Sky

In 1999 Ringgold began working on the Coming to Jones Route Series, which focused on the escape of slaves to the due north via the Underground Railroad. Here she combines a gimmicky artistic practice, screen-press with a story quilt that in image and text conveys the story of the slaves' flying to freedom. The use of bright, vibrant colors and flat, simplified shapes are both reminiscent of the work of Henri Matisse. The border is tie-dyed piecework with an outer edge of zebra striped fabric.

In the central paradigm 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 tall green trees with blue trunks and, ultimately to the house on Jones Road. Just correct of the upper center of the image, the sun can be seen. The epitome is bordered with text conveying the story.

The black figures on the red ground and beneath a cherry heaven suggest the hard struggle for freedom in a earth saturated with racial violence. The small yellow sun is the only brilliant spot in the epitome, its xanthous highlighted by the xanthous sunbursts of the border. Ringgold explained her creative intention; "I accept tried to couple the dazzler of this place with the harsh realities of its racist history to create a liberty series that turns all of the ugliness of spirit, past and present into something livable."

Many of the works in this series include landscapes. In 1992, Ringgold moved with her married man, Burdette from Harlem to Englewood, New Jersey, purchasing a home on Jones Road, maxim "I came over here and landed on Jones Road - you know my maiden name is Jones, so I just felt that this was where I was supposed to exist - and bought this house." Wanting to build a studio behind the new dwelling, notwithstanding, she met with a bang-up deal of resistance from the predominantly white neighborhood, which fought the proposal, a reaction that Ringgold felt reflected racial prejudice. She responded to the feel by turning her artistic efforts toward capturing the area'south natural beauty and built 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 away from my neighbors' unfolded antagonism 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 every bit her own habitation, Ringgold is able to enfold herself inside the story likewise every bit the history.

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

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Useful Resource on Organized religion Ringgold

Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle

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

"Faith Ringgold Creative person Overview and Assay". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Laurentia McIntosh, PhD
Available from:
First published on 07 May 2017. Updated and modified regularly
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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/ringgold-faith/