"ON SAYING WHO YOU ARE: FAITH RINGGOLD"

 “ON SAYING WHO YOU ARE: FAITH RINGGOLD”

A provocative art piece would greet Caroline and me when we were pastors at Oakhurst.  It was a wonderful print of a story quilt by Faith Ringgold.  It hung on the wall facing the church office as you entered the doors near the office.  The print was entitled “Church Picnic,” and it depicted a Black church picnic in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park in 1909.  The quilt had been commissioned by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and Ringgold had presented it in 1988.  One of our stalwart Oakhurst artists and visionaries, Virginia Gailey, had purchased the print for the church and had it framed for us to hang on that wall.  There is a powerful story behind the quilt, but in this Women’s Herstory Month, I want to concentrate on Faith Ringgold’s story.  I hope that you’ll find this quilt for yourself online and look up its backstory too!  She now has a retrospective exhibit at the New Museum in Manhattan entitled “Faith Ringgold:  American People.”  For more info and a review of this exhibit see the NYT 2/18/22.

Faith Ringgold was born in Harlem in 1930 to Andrew Jones and Willi Posey Jones, descendants of working class families who left the South in one of the Great Migrations.  Her mom was a fashion designer, and her father was a remarkable storyteller.  She grew up on the edges of the Harlem Renaissance, and her neighbors included Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes, along with her boyhood friend Sonny Rollins.  At her mother’s feet, she learned the visual arts, using crayons in her youth and learning to sew and use fabric in many creative ways.  At her father’s feet, she learned the power of narrative, to be used in all types of art.  She wanted to be an artist to combine her tradition and her vision.

In 1950 she enrolled at the City College of New York in order to better develop and to major in art.  Much to her dismay, she learned that women were not allowed to major in art – she had to settle for art education.  She did get an unexpected benefit from it – she got a job teaching in public school in New York.  One of her students there was Paula Baldwin, younger sister of James Baldwin.  Ms. Baldwin Whaley would introduce Ringgold to her brother and his writings.  Baldwin would befriend her and mentor her and introduce her to important people in art.  In response to her interest in art, two of the male friends, Romare Bearden and Hale Woodruff, would figuratively pat her on the head, reminding her that serious art was a male endeavor.

Faith Ringgold was not deterred by these patriarchal reactions – she marched on into painting, and with inspiration from Baldwin and Jacob Lawrence, she put together a series of paintings entitled “American People Series” in 1963.  It is the series that is the basis for the current exhibit in the New Museum.  This series  depicted American life in relation to the burgeoning civil rights movement.  She focused on these interactions from a female point of view, and this series illustrates the intersectionality of race and gender in her art and in her point of view.  This was her reaction to the racism and sexism which sought to push her to the side:  “No other creative field is as closed to those who are not white and male as is the visual arts. After I decided to be an artist, the first thing that I had to believe was that I, a black woman, could penetrate the art scene, and that, further, I could do so without sacrificing one iota of my blackness or my femaleness or my humanity.”

She decided to add quilting to her artistic repertoire in order to step away from the male dominated Western/European medium of painting.  Long associated with “women’s work,” quilting became a medium for Ringgold to express both her womanist and anti-racist perspective.  Her mother’s help and expertise were part of her collaboration, as she added quilting to her wide range of art, and in 1980, her first story quilt “Echoes of Harlem,” was produced.  As she said: “In 1983, I began writing stories on my quilts s an alternative.  That way, when my quilts were hung up to look at, or photographed for a book, people could still read my stories.”  Her first quilt story was “Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?”.  It shows Aunt Jemima as a matriarch restaurant owner and seeks to redeem, as she put it “the most maligned black female stereotype.”

Her artistic creativity seems to know no bounds – she has written 17 children’s books, done sculpture, and she is a performance artist.  She has won numerous awards, is Professor Emeritus from UC San Diego,  and has been arrested  at protests related to racism and sexism and artistic freedom.  Her print “United States of Attica” was a tribute to the people killed in the Attica prison by a police attack.  From crayons to clay, from paints to fabric, from performance to protest, Faith Ringgold has been on the vanguard of visionary leadership.  In this Women’s Herstory Month, check out her artistic work and her continuing prophetic life.  In her words:  “You can't sit around and wait for somebody to say who you are. You need to write it and paint it and do it.”