The Brattleboro Museum and Art Center is currently showing an exhibit of works by Faith Ringgold, the celebrated African American artist who works in many mediums, including silkscreened quilts, prints, and books. The exhibit, which opened in July, runs through March 4, 2007.
Ringgold’s work is art as advocacy: playful, political, colorful, and surreal. It is not heavy-handed, yet it interrogates our country’s record of history, patriarchy, racism, and privilege directly, and with courage. Her unique body of work is inspired by the legacy of her people and her gender. Ringgold is an optimistic activist who invites us to say what we mean and do what we say. “If One Can, Anyone Can. All you Gotta Do Is Try,” declares her Web site greeting.
Ringgold, now a professor at the University of California at San Diego, was born in Harlem in 1930 and educated at the City College of New York. She began as a painter and has become famous for her painted story quilts. The Brattleboro Museum and Art Center’s Web site notes that, “In the 1960s, through her art and through political protest, she worked with other African American artists toward the inclusion of women and minorities in museum exhibits.” Ringgold’s work is held in the permanent collections of a number of museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, 1997, Silkscreen, 28" x 31".
Courtesy: ACA Galleries, New York, NY.
In one strikingly optimistic quilt, Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles (1991), a bright cobalt blue sky tops a horizontal field bursting out with giant sunflower heads crowded together, nodding and lifting, beaming and shifting in every direction like a gregarious choir chorusing a song of dazzling golds, lemon yellows and apricots. The sunny petals halo irises of brown and orange, centering into irregular pupils dilated with merry glances. Here and there, a few charcoal profiles peek human-faced from the flower heads.
Surrounded by the flowers, eight African American women freedom fighters who blazed a fearless trail through American history—including Coretta Scott King, Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks—line the mid-ground, holding the edges of an outspread quilt pieced with more sunflowers. To the side and slightly behind them stands a shyly courting Vincent van Gogh, proffering his vase of sunflowers in homage to the venerable ladies assembled, some of whom look as if they sense the presence of their artist-suitor, but none directly turning back towards him. Their expressions are contemplative and only a few look directly at the viewer. The range of skin color among the women—ebony, charcoal, sienna, cinnamon, peach—echoes the spectrum of hues in the flowers. Van Gogh’s colors, warm-toned in his buttery straw hat and rusty beard, echo the petal haloes; his shirt is the color of the sky. Ringgold has likened the sunflowers in this work to African Americans in solidarity: many together, tall, strong and turning their faces to follow the sun.
While most of the pictorial elements are composed horizontally, the stylized sunflowers on the quilt-within-the-quilt drop vertically, enclosed in diamond-shaped segments that recall van Gogh’s Starry, Starry Night. The field flowers resemble the tumbling, burning orbs of his ode to the glimmering night, a quietly passionate juxtaposition of suns referencing stars, art referencing life, past pointing us “back to the future.” Ringgold joins Arles to Alabama, art to abolition, reversing the classic, chauvinistic order of the White European Male Canon vis-a-vis African-American women’s contributions to global human rights and art history.
Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles seems to suggest that these sunflower worker “bees” played political hard-ball better and more bravely than the “old world” privileged boys, symbolized here by a row of buildings and houses behind the line of women. They gaze beatific and serene in front of the “Big House,” confident that the legacy of their past will live on in the future. Van Gogh, the quintessential “mad” genius who identified with land laborers (whose lives paralleled in many ways those of enslaved African Americans), is portrayed here as the black matriarchs’ disciple. By casting him in the role of a servant-supplicant, Ringgold reminds us of the potent catalyzing aesthetic and psychological influence that African art, though historically marginalized, has exerted on European and Western art. She also paints a statement of equality for women and people of color in the cultural canon.
Mary Fifield lives in Barre and is an imbiber of Beauty whenever and wherever possible.
