Tar Beach 2, 1990–92
Faith Ringgold
Silkscreen on silk
This is one of Ringgold’s ‘story quilts’, partly made in response to her autobiography being rejected by a publisher. Textiles offered her a platform to tell her own stories. She draws on a rich tradition of African American women quiltmakers, including her great-great grandmother Susie Shannon, who had been born into enslavement in antebellum Florida and had produced quilts for plantation owners. Ringgold was also influenced by fifteenth-century Tibetan and Nepalese thangka paintings, whose rollable scroll form she saw as a solution to the challenge of moving, storing and transporting paintings. Textiles were a means for creative autonomy, both practically and conceptually.
This quilt charts the story of Cassie Louise Lightfoot, who dreams of the stars lifting her up from her family’s Harlem rooftop (‘Tar Beach’) to fly over the George Washington Bridge. The text reveals the conditions of Cassie’s life, including the financial pressures on her family and the discrimination they faced. For Ringgold, textiles can hold defiant stories of agency in the face of oppression. Cassie’s magical power of flying means that ‘I am free to go wherever I want to for the rest of my life’.*
From the exhibition
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art
(February – May 2024)
Textiles are vital to our lives. We are swaddled in them when we’re born, we wrap our bodies in them every day, and we’re shrouded in them when we die.
What does it mean to imagine a needle, a loom or a garment as a tool of resistance? How can textiles unpack, question, unspool, unravel and therefore reimagine the world around us?
Since the 1960s, textiles have become increasingly present in artistic practices for subversive ends. This is significant as the medium has been historically undervalued within the hierarchies of Western art history. Textiles have been considered ‘craft’ in opposition to definitions of ‘fine art’, gendered as feminine and marginalised by scholars and the art market. The 50 international artists in this show challenge these classifications, harnessing the medium to speak powerfully about intimate, everyday stories as well as wider socio-political narratives, teasing out these entangled concerns through a stitch, a knot, a braid, through the warp and the weft. These artists defy traditional expectations of textiles, embracing abstraction or figuration to push the boundaries of the medium. They draw on its material history to reveal ideas relating to gender, labour, value, ecology, ancestral knowledge, and histories of oppression, extraction and trade.
Rather than dictating a chronological history of fibre art, the exhibition is organised in thematic dialogues between artists — across both generations and geographies — to explore how artists have embraced textiles to critique or push up against regimes of power. Some artists work alone with solitary, near-meditative practices, while others reflect the shared approach that the medium often invites, working with collaborators in acts of community and solidarity. Spanning intimate hand-crafted pieces to large-scale sculptural installations, these artworks communicate multi-layered stories about lived experience, invoking the vital issues embedded in fibre and thread.
[*Barbican Centre]
Taken at the Barbican Centre
Tar Beach 2, 1990–92
Faith Ringgold
Silkscreen on silk
This is one of Ringgold’s ‘story quilts’, partly made in response to her autobiography being rejected by a publisher. Textiles offered her a platform to tell her own stories. She draws on a rich tradition of African American women quiltmakers, including her great-great grandmother Susie Shannon, who had been born into enslavement in antebellum Florida and had produced quilts for plantation owners. Ringgold was also influenced by fifteenth-century Tibetan and Nepalese thangka paintings, whose rollable scroll form she saw as a solution to the challenge of moving, storing and transporting paintings. Textiles were a means for creative autonomy, both practically and conceptually.
This quilt charts the story of Cassie Louise Lightfoot, who dreams of the stars lifting her up from her family’s Harlem rooftop (‘Tar Beach’) to fly over the George Washington Bridge. The text reveals the conditions of Cassie’s life, including the financial pressures on her family and the discrimination they faced. For Ringgold, textiles can hold defiant stories of agency in the face of oppression. Cassie’s magical power of flying means that ‘I am free to go wherever I want to for the rest of my life’.*
From the exhibition
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art
(February – May 2024)
Textiles are vital to our lives. We are swaddled in them when we’re born, we wrap our bodies in them every day, and we’re shrouded in them when we die.
What does it mean to imagine a needle, a loom or a garment as a tool of resistance? How can textiles unpack, question, unspool, unravel and therefore reimagine the world around us?
Since the 1960s, textiles have become increasingly present in artistic practices for subversive ends. This is significant as the medium has been historically undervalued within the hierarchies of Western art history. Textiles have been considered ‘craft’ in opposition to definitions of ‘fine art’, gendered as feminine and marginalised by scholars and the art market. The 50 international artists in this show challenge these classifications, harnessing the medium to speak powerfully about intimate, everyday stories as well as wider socio-political narratives, teasing out these entangled concerns through a stitch, a knot, a braid, through the warp and the weft. These artists defy traditional expectations of textiles, embracing abstraction or figuration to push the boundaries of the medium. They draw on its material history to reveal ideas relating to gender, labour, value, ecology, ancestral knowledge, and histories of oppression, extraction and trade.
Rather than dictating a chronological history of fibre art, the exhibition is organised in thematic dialogues between artists — across both generations and geographies — to explore how artists have embraced textiles to critique or push up against regimes of power. Some artists work alone with solitary, near-meditative practices, while others reflect the shared approach that the medium often invites, working with collaborators in acts of community and solidarity. Spanning intimate hand-crafted pieces to large-scale sculptural installations, these artworks communicate multi-layered stories about lived experience, invoking the vital issues embedded in fibre and thread.
[*Barbican Centre]
Taken at the Barbican Centre