Dear Reader,
It is a small exhibition by most standards. Sixteen artworks
in a variety of media—including paintings, prints, textiles,
and large-scale soft sculpture, but its colossal effect outweighs
its diminutive size. Faith Ringgold is 93 years old and a powerhouse
of feminist and political expression. You might be more intrigued
by her work if there were an image to accompany my blog, so
I invite you to stop and do a search. Or, if you are in the
central Massachusetts area, please stop into the exhibition
on view from October 7, 2023, through March 17, 2024.
I am not an art critic, but I live and breathe art and will
describe what I experienced today visiting “Freedom to
Say What I Please.” It is a case of my having seen Ringgold’s
work singly, hanging in American museums among Jacob Lawrence
and Reginald Marsh paintings. That her art is exhibited now,
while she is still alive, is unusual. Museum purchases and gifts
are frequently weighted in the safer territory of “the
artist is dead and cannot produce any new work to confuse the
complete body of work, which then can be assessed as a whole.”
Some of Ringgold’s sixteen pieces haunted and/or enchanted
me. Two story quilts were mesmerizing, with their vibrant colors
and complex compositions: “Picasso’s Studio”
and “Tar Beach #2.” In the first, the visual field
is full to bursting, with an audacious rendering of “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon”
in the background, and Picasso on the left so you almost bump
into him as you enter the scene. He cannot avoid seeing Ringgold
posed nude in front of his art-world shattering painting. Hanging
over Picasso’s head is the African mask that inspired him
and Georges Braque to create cubism. The quilt wags its finger
at art history and gives credit where it is due. Handwritten
panels above and below the scene feature a letter from Ringgold’s
to her Aunt Melissa, who advised her: “The only thing you
have to do is create art of importance to YOU. Show us a new
way to look at life.” I almost wept when I read those words
and the opening quotation. Voices from the past rise up in the
best of times and the worst of times.
“Tar Beach #2” is more a magic carpet than a quilt–
a Harlem rooftop on a summer night, colorful skyscrapers and
Ringgold’s beloved George Washington Bridge in the background,
a family having a picnic on the tar roof. There is a borrowed
green card table and another nearby holding the evening’s
feast. A family quartet sits at the card table, while Faith
and her younger brother lie on a beach blanket, sunning themselves
in the starlight. Bliss pours from every fiber of this quilt.
In the starry sky, a ten-stanza poem tells the story –
you can almost hear Faith telling her little brother how she
can fly into the sky - that is just the beginning of this quilt’s
(and exhibition’s) enchantment.
