We’re Not in Kansas
The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, 1996
Faith Ringgold, American, 1930 - 2024
Nine-color lithograph
When it comes to intersectional artists, there are few as iconic as Ringgold. Over the course of her seven-decade professional career, Ringgold was a painter, sculptor, mixed-media constructor, performance artist, dollmaker, author, activist, and, as suggested by this work, a narrative quilter. In her work, Ringgold confronts both explicitly and tacitly the construct of art history (and all history for that matter) and how it has been told and visualized.
Who has been left out of history? What happens when we revisit history - or popular histories - with new attention especially to the stories of women and people of color, whose lives, ordinary or extraordinary, have been too often overlooked or erased? More specifically, in paintings, sculptures, or in the form of story quilts, for which Ringgold is best known, can we stitch literally back into history the stories of African American experience?
Beginning with her political American People paintings in the 1960s and through works like The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, Ringgold showcases her prowess for storytelling and using her work to initiate conversations on race, gender inequality, and social justice. While her full-sized, mixed-media canvas and fabric story quilts are designed to hang as works of art on museum and gallery walls, Ringgold intentionally evokes the figurative style of quilts — flattened, seemingly "naive" - throughout her career because, as she explains, "I think of quilts as the classic art form of Black people in America."
Accordingly, this lithograph harkens back to the centrality of quilts to the lives of African American women as much as to Ringgold's own body of work. Here, eight African American women of the past and present gather in Arles, famously the French town where Vincent van Gogh, painter of sunflowers, lived from 1888-89.
With the ever-celebrated but unknown-in-his-lifetime van Gogh relegated to the sidelines, these women (including Harriet Tubman, Ida Wells, Sojourner Truth, and Rosa Parks) come to the fore, with each of their names "stitched" into the sunflower quilt they hold collectively and that sews together their stories and experiences in unity amidst a world still in need of deep social change. At lower left, in a sunflower dress, Willia Marie Simone is an imagined character created by Ringgold and inserted into this re-imagined history.
We’re Not in Kansas
The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, 1996
Faith Ringgold, American, 1930 - 2024
Nine-color lithograph
When it comes to intersectional artists, there are few as iconic as Ringgold. Over the course of her seven-decade professional career, Ringgold was a painter, sculptor, mixed-media constructor, performance artist, dollmaker, author, activist, and, as suggested by this work, a narrative quilter. In her work, Ringgold confronts both explicitly and tacitly the construct of art history (and all history for that matter) and how it has been told and visualized.
Who has been left out of history? What happens when we revisit history - or popular histories - with new attention especially to the stories of women and people of color, whose lives, ordinary or extraordinary, have been too often overlooked or erased? More specifically, in paintings, sculptures, or in the form of story quilts, for which Ringgold is best known, can we stitch literally back into history the stories of African American experience?
Beginning with her political American People paintings in the 1960s and through works like The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, Ringgold showcases her prowess for storytelling and using her work to initiate conversations on race, gender inequality, and social justice. While her full-sized, mixed-media canvas and fabric story quilts are designed to hang as works of art on museum and gallery walls, Ringgold intentionally evokes the figurative style of quilts — flattened, seemingly "naive" - throughout her career because, as she explains, "I think of quilts as the classic art form of Black people in America."
Accordingly, this lithograph harkens back to the centrality of quilts to the lives of African American women as much as to Ringgold's own body of work. Here, eight African American women of the past and present gather in Arles, famously the French town where Vincent van Gogh, painter of sunflowers, lived from 1888-89.
With the ever-celebrated but unknown-in-his-lifetime van Gogh relegated to the sidelines, these women (including Harriet Tubman, Ida Wells, Sojourner Truth, and Rosa Parks) come to the fore, with each of their names "stitched" into the sunflower quilt they hold collectively and that sews together their stories and experiences in unity amidst a world still in need of deep social change. At lower left, in a sunflower dress, Willia Marie Simone is an imagined character created by Ringgold and inserted into this re-imagined history.