Faith Ringgold : Story Quilts
Currently on view at the Danforth Museum of Art, Faith Ringgold: Story Quilts, brings rarely seen works by the award-winning African American artist and children’s author to the Framingham gallery through March 1. The exhibit includes five finished story quilts, related sketches and paintings, and a mixed-media soft sculpture.
Ringgold is most celebrated for her large-scale story quilts, which integrate quilted fabric, painting and narrative text. They are featured in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, among others. Her distinctive aesthetic alludes to African and American folk traditions as well as high modernist art, incorporating a strong sense of black and female identity. Born in Harlem in 1930, Ringgold studied art at the City College of New York before becoming a public school teacher and a political activist in the late 1960s and ’70s, protesting institutional exclusion of black artists.
She has published eleven children’s books and garnered numerous awards; Tar Beach, her first book, won a Caldecott Medal and a Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration in 1991. Her original illustrations for Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky are on display in the museum’s Children’s Gallery.
The exhibit’s centerpiece is "Le Café des Artistes" (1994), a 79.5" x 90" story quilt from her "French Collection" series, which depicts notable African American artists, including Ringgold herself, at an outdoor Parisian café alongside the giants of French modernism. On loan from a private collection and shown publicly for the first time in ten years, this work links celebrated painters like Gauguin and Van Gogh, whom Ringgold said she was encouraged to copy in art school, with talented black artists ignored by the (white) mainstream. The quilt fulfills the goals of her early political activism, carving out a space for those artists in the canon of modern art.
The exhibit also includes two quilts from Ringgold’s "Coming to Jones Road" series of 1999-2000, which interprets the artist’s experience of moving to an unfriendly white neighborhood in Englewood, NJ, using stories from the Underground Railroad. Story quilts and sketches from the recent series "Jazz Stories: Mama Can Sing, Papa Can Blow" (2004) depict glamorous female singers and cool, mustachioed musicians, taking up one of the most recognized and vital aspects of African American culture.
Ringgold’s use of quilting is loaded with symbolism: as a cultural artifact, the quilt was associated historically with women and slaves who, prevented from learning to read, used them to provide visual cues for storytelling. Ringgold herself learned to quilt from her mother, to whom the technique was passed through generations dating back to the artist’s great-great-grandmother, a slave who made quilts for her owners. Typically classified as a craft rather than a fine art, the quilt also provides an apt metaphor for the marginal position of both women and blacks in American society.
Originally, however, Ringgold took up the practice as a matter of convenience, not as a political statement. In her lecture, she said she began to paint on quilts because they were easier to transport than the traditional stretched canvas. "They would have the structure, they would be lightweight, they could be shipped anywhere," she said. "It was wonderful." This allowed her to send large works to colleges and galleries around the country, reaching an audience outside New York’s exclusive art scene.
The quilts also gave Ringgold a voice in a more literal sense: her first story quilt, created in 1984, was an outlet for the memoirs she couldn’t get published. "I had to put my words on my art to get people to see them," she said. In the process of earning official recognition, the story quilts also helped make the landscape of contemporary art more democratic. Mixing painting with narrative and folk techniques, tailored to African American themes, they challenged the traditional boundaries of fine art.
In conjunction with the Faith Ringgold exhibit, the Danforth Museum of Art is showing "Mixed Media Fiber Arts," a collection of works by contemporary artists that incorporate variations on quilting with painting, printmaking and other craft techniques. Works by Jacob Lawrence and Meta Warrick Fuller, two of the black artists featured in Ringgold’s "Le Café des Artistes," are also on display in adjoining galleries.
On February 17, the artist visited the museum (123 Union Ave.) to meet children participating in school vacation workshops and delivered a lecture at Framingham State College as part of its Arts and Humanities Series.
