That’s Not Your Story: Faith Ringgold Publishing on Cloth

Faith Ringgold’s artistic career, which now spans more than five decades, includes activism, writing, as well as performance art and the creation of paintings, political posters and quilts. Born in Harlem, New York, in 1930, Ringgold is an African-American artist who has been acknowledged in the context of the United States by art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson as “one of the earliest feminists to incorporate textiles into her practice.”¹ Her published writing includes numerous children’s books and a memoir, We Flew Over the Bridge (1995). Despite enjoying considerable acclaim, Ringgold’s own acknowledgement that “I can’t get through the world without recognizing that race and sex influence everything I do in my life” presents us with the intersectional politics that have long impacted her career.² In this writing I move away from some of the more well-rehearsed aspects of Ringgold’s career as an activist,³ painter,⁴ and performance artist,⁵ to focus on one specific aspect of her artistic practice: the relationship between text and textile found in Ringgold’s storytelling quilts, and the events that led her to use textile as a surface on which she could publish.

In a public dialogue with Serpentine Galleries Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist to accompany her eponymous solo exhibition in London (6 June-8 September, 2019), Ringgold recounted her original publisher’s reaction to an early draft of her memoir, first titled Being My Own Woman, which would eventually be published as We Flew Over the Bridge:

She [the publisher] said this is not your story. And I said, oh my goodness. First, she had said before that she was going to publish my book. I don’t know why she just looked at me and decided that my book was going to be one way. And it wasn’t that way. So, when I did give her my autobiography growing up in Harlem and going to City College and all the trials and tribulations, she decided that’s not your story. Because most of the writers, black women writers, who had written their stories at that time were writing stories of all the horrors their lives had brought them. Well I am sorry. My life had not been a horror. I hadn’t gotten raped and thrown out the window, beat up, and all that. That didn’t happen to me. So, what am I supposed to do? Make that up so that I get published? And maybe some of them did that too. I don’t know. But I decided I wanted to tell my story.⁶

When Obrist asked Ringgold how she arrived at the format of the story quilt, she returned to the topic of publishing: “Well, how can I get published? How can I get my word out there?”⁷ “The way to do it is to write it on my art. Write it. Nobody can stop me from doing that. I do have speech in that regard.”⁸

Where Ringgold has recounted the challenges she faced publishing her memoir, Curlee Raven Holton adds that Ringgold “has been called a feminist, but she is quick to remind us that the feminist movement did not naturally seek out faces that looked like hers.”⁹ American art historian Alissa Auther notes that “Ringgold’s and other feminist artists’ search for an artistic identity outside the mainstream is intimately connected with their legitimate desires to practice professionally in an art world hostile to their presence.”¹⁰ “In Ringgold’s case this was an assertion of racial identity in art that necessarily questioned the Western marginalization of African art as craft.”¹¹

Recalling her childhood, Ringgold notes, “I grew up in Harlem during the Great Depression. This does not mean I was poor and oppressed. We were protected from oppression and surrounded by a loving family.”¹² In Ringgold’s case, the initial “failure” of her biography in the eyes of her original publisher to recount an experience of poverty or violence, which she had not, in fact, lived, inspired her decision to turn instead to writing on textiles. “Later, Faith would note that this was the beginning of her inclusion of actual written text in her work and perhaps the beginning of her formal career as a writer.”¹³ Ironically, turning to cloth as a place of publishing also drew Ringgold’s practice into debates about the value of art versus craft that risked compounding the marginalisation she already experienced by virtue of her gender and race. Auther notes, “Importantly, Faith Ringgold’s exploration of the art/craft divide demonstrated that these relations were informed not only by gender but also by race, expanding the feminist critique of aesthetic hierarchy beyond its connection to the domestic sphere.”¹⁴

The Quilt as Storyteller

Quilts appear across a broad range of cultural contexts and historical moments as storytellers— at times storytellers under duress. Under General Pinochet’s dictatorship of Chile (1973-1990), stitched textile arpilleras smuggled out of the country announced missing husbands, sons and brothers of those who had sewn the cloths before other forms of reporting, such as radio and newsprint.¹⁵ In Zimbabwe, projects such as the Weya Appliqués sewn in the late 1980s and through the early 2000s are also part of a storytelling tradition, initially financed by tourism, but eventually confronting topics such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic.¹⁶ More recently, exhibitions such as Life in the Margins at Spike Island, Bristol, recognised the career of Filipino American artist Pacita Abad (1946-2004), whose large scale works combine painting and trapunto and share similarities with Ringgold’s aesthetic.¹⁷ Ringgold herself wrote of Abad’s work: “Widely travelled, Abad creates her work from the point of view of an international woman of color. Those of us who have also travelled extensively know that creative women of color are working all over the world and are not merely ‘minority’ figures within the narrow confines of the Western art world.”¹⁸

But African-American scholar bell hooks also cautions against sweeping comparisons. She calls, without deploying the term, for what we may today name as recognition of intersectionality at work:

The work of black women quiltmakers needs special feminist critical commentary which considers the impact of race, sex and class. Many black women quilted despite oppressive economic and social circumstance which often demanded exercising creative imagination in ways radically different from those of white female counterparts, especially women of privilege who had greater access to material and time. Often black slave women quilted as part of their labor in white households.¹⁹

The warning hooks offers is applicable to reading Ringgold’s quilts, whose family history is the experience of enslaved labour: “Willi Posey [Ringgold’s mother] described watching her grandmother, Betsy Bingham, boil and bleach flower sacks to line the quilts she sewed. Susie Shannon, Betsy’s mother, was a slave in antebellum Florida who made quilts as part of her duties.”²⁰

Textile production, most acutely cotton, and American slavery were mutually dependent. As Sven Beckert observes in his extensive study of cotton’s history, “Cotton demanded quite literally a hunt for labor and a perpetual struggle for its control […] the attendant physical and psychological violence of holding millions in bondage were of central importance to the expansion of cotton production in the United States and of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.”²¹ While hooks’s warning is accurate with regards to Ringgold’s family history, she also runs the danger of pressing autobiographical expectation onto the work in a manner similar to Ringgold’s early experience with publishing . Quilts, for all their capacity for storytelling, have also been subjected to overclaims regarding their narrative influence.

One example of the inflation of the storytelling potential of quilts is found in the contribution quilts may have made to enslaved individuals navigating the Underground Railroad.²² Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard published a largely contested book arguing that quilts literally held in their patterns codes, which directed enslaved individuals who travelled towards their freedom in American States where slavery was not legal.²³ The premise that these codes, retold through oral history communicated by one quilt shop owner, Ozella Williams in Charleston, South Carolina, functioned as coded maps has been roundly disputed, perhaps most effectively through basic recognition that travel occurred on foot at night where hanging quilts as markers or maps would not only have raised suspicions, but also been impossible for those travelling under the cover of darkness to see.²⁴ As Fergus M. Bordewich writes:

The larger importance of the Underground Railroad lies not in fanciful legends, but in the diverse history of the men and women, black and white, who made it work and in the far-reaching political and moral consequences of what they did. The Underground Railroad was the nation’s first great movement of mass civil disobedience after the American Revolution, engaging thousands of citizens in the active subversion of federal law, as well as the first mass movement that asserted the principle of personal responsibility for others’ human rights. It was also the nation’s first interracial political movement, which from its beginning in the 1790s joined free blacks, abolitionist whites and sometimes slaves in a collaboration that shattered racial taboos.²⁵

Tobin and Dobard’s writing about the Underground Railroad turned potential into fact, but in the absence of substantial corroborating evidence. For many other examples globally, textiles, and perhaps quilts in particular, do deserve recognition not only as storytellers, but as storytellers with the potential to communicate alternative and unsanctioned versions of history. The inverse is also true: the quilt as structure, metaphor and symbol appears and contributes to fiction writing.

Literary Quilts

Scholarship about the appearance of quilting in American literature includes Elaine Showalter’s reading of similarities between quilt and narrative structures in American women’s writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.²⁶ Showalter writes, “I would like to suggest that a knowledge of piecing, the technique of assembling fragments into an intricate and ingenious design, can provide the contexts in which we can interpret and understand the forms, meanings, and narrative traditions of American women’s writing.”²⁷ Much like hooks, and despite her enthusiasm for the range of circumstances in which quilting took and takes place,²⁸ Showalter calls for an attention to specific contexts: “in order to understand the relationship between piecing and American women’s writing, we must also deromanticize the art of the quilt, situate it in its historical contexts, and discard many of the sentimental stereotypes of an idealized, sisterly, and nonhierarchic women’s culture that cling to it.”²⁹

Showalter is far from alone in her line of inquiry. Sunny Falling-rain uses a similar reading strategy to trace the structure of what she views as the crazy quilt in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987):

Morrison literarily created a patchwork crazy quilt. Every component of the crazy quilt has a counterpart in the novel. The range of literary techniques used to develop the novel as a crazy quilt includes direct statements about quilts, colors, fabrics, and quilting, and their meaning in the lives of the characters. But the author also created very subtle techniques to imitate quilting structures, techniques which I believe could only have been noticed by someone knowledgeable about quilting—someone looking for structures reminiscent of the crazy quilt.³⁰

I would add that the quilt in Beloved exists not only in fabric remnants and quilting structures that Falling-rain traces throughout the novel, but also in patches of colour claimed from the body:

Her past had been like her present—intolerable— and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left for pondering color.

“Bring a little lavender in, if you got any. Pink, if you don’t.”

And Sethe would oblige her with anything from fabric to her own tongue. Winter in Ohio was especially rough if you had an appetite for color. Sky provided the only drama, and counting on a Cincinnati horizon for life’s principal joy was reckless indeed.³¹

Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple (1982), which inspired Ringgold’s The Purple Quilt (1986), also gives textiles and sewing considerable influence within the narrative.³² The book’s main voice is Celie’s, with much of the book told through letters between Celie and her sister Nettie, who works as a missionary with the fictitious Olinka people in Africa. A quilt is used to trigger memories on Corrine’s, Nettie’s employer and fellow missionary, death bed and confirm accurate biological motherhood.³³ Designing and sewing trousers allows Celie some economic and personal empowerment in the cottage industry she names Folkspants Unlimited.³⁴ And the importance of visual beauty found both in the textile and in textile-like fragments in Beloved—seeing pink in winter carried on the tongue—is also apparent in Walker’s novel when Shug, after introducing Celie to her own sexuality, observes, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”³⁵

On a number of occasions hooks also refers to quilts in her essay writing. In versions of her writing published in The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production the layout of text and “patches” appear while hooks recalls the aesthetic inheritance of her own childhood.³⁶ Small white blocks, devoid of text, initially punctuate the page and disrupt the expected rhythms of consistent columns of words. As hooks’s writing progresses, some empty blocks start to be partially filled with sections of images from Ringgold’s quilts, initially incomplete, then building towards completion as the writing unfolds, suggesting yet another approach to Showalter’s historical inquiries.³⁷

Faith Ringgold’s Storytelling Quilts

Ringgold’s strategy of publishing on cloth emerged in the 1980s, exemplified in story quilts such as Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima? (1983), Slave Rape Story Quilt (1985) and The Purple Quilt (1986). Her use of textile materials is credited to the influence of her mother, Willi Posey Jones, a local fashion designer, and Ringgold’s viewing of thanka paintings.³⁸ The feminist author Michele Wallace, one of Ringgold’s two daughters, reflects that her mother “saw in these unframed scrolls” of fifteenth-century Tibetan and Nepalese thanka paintings at the Rijksmuseum in the summer of 1972 “a solution to her problem in moving, storing and transporting paintings […] Paintings on tankas [sic] could be rolled.”³⁹ Ringgold herself explains in an interview from 1975:

Who said that art is oil paint stretched on canvas with art frames? I didn’t say that. Nobody who ever looked like me said that, so why the hell am I doing that? So I just stopped; and now I do sewing and all kinds of things. Sewing has been traditionally what all women in all cultures have done. What’s wrong with that? Politically speaking, I think some women would probably say, “I don’t want to be placed in the bag [of] women’s art… sewing.” Okay, that’s your choice… I don’t want to be placed in the bag where I think that all art is about making something that nobody can move. Making some big, monumental, monolithic thing which I can’t even afford to do… Feminist art is soft art, lightweight art, sewing art. This is the contribution women have made that is uniquely theirs.⁴⁰

Wallace observes that the Slave Rape series (1972) “serve as predecessors of an idea more fully conceived in the story quilts in the 1980s” through their use of a fabric border inspired by the thanka paintings and supported by the guidance of Ringgold’s mother’s sewing skills. Each work in the three-piece series contains a central painted image of unclothed and partially camouflaged by foliage “African women resisting captivity and sexual assault”.⁴¹ The works are framed by pieced cloth edging, which belie the material expectations of the white cube to conform to right angles and straight edges. Arguably, the fabric could have been stitched straighter, the compositions more balanced, if that aesthetic had been desired. This treatment of the textile, but not the details of stitching, is a stylistic trait that runs throughout Ringgold’s work with cloth.

But sewing is not, as Ringgold claims, “what all women in all cultures have done”. Walker addresses this European and North American stereotype late in The Color Purple through a dialogue between Celie and Albert, the husband Celie’s stepfather essentially sold her to and who subjected her to rape, who have reached some form of reconciliation through their mutual love and rejection by the same woman.⁴² Celie has learnt through her sister’s missionary work in Africa that textile traditions such as sewing are not organised as she has experienced in America and tries to share this knowledge with Albert. Their dialogue offers a poignant vignette of the gender norms they live with:

Men and women not suppose to wear the same thing, he said. Men spose to wear the pants.
So I said, You ought to tell that to the mens in Africa.
Say what? He ast. First time he ever thought bout what Africans do. […]
And men sew in Africa, too, I say.
They do? He ast.
Yeah, I say. They not so backward as mens here.
When I was growing up, he said, I use to try to sew along with mama cause that’s what she always doing. But everybody laughed at me. But you know, I liked it.
Well, nodboy gon laugh at you now, I said. Here, help me stitch in these pockets.
But I don’t know how, he say.
I’ll show you, I said. And I did.
Now us sit sewing and talking and smoking our pipes.⁴³

Ringgold later collaborated with her mother on what is credited as her first quilt in 1980 Echoes of Harlem.⁴⁴ The quilt is composed of blocks of painted faces, without accompanying text, which Auther has described as, “a sewn grid of pieced fabric with strong references to the African-American quilting tradition in its use of remnants and improvisational contrast of color and pattern”, noting that Ringgold later expressed her regret at not following her mother’s original idea for the border, “afraid the pattern would look unprofessional. Once she came to understand how her mother’s interest in the freehand piecing of the quilt border related to the African American quiltmaking tradition, she regretted not following through with the original idea.”⁴⁵ In dialogue with Obrist, Ringgold reflects on the quilt’s content:

FR: In the 1960s in Harlem, there was a riot every five minutes in the street.

HUO: You could see riots in the street, you experienced them, but footage wasn’t reported on the TV or in the newspapers?

FR: No, nothing at all. I could not understand that you could be standing in the street and you would not see anything on the news when you got home. It occurred to me that someone was keeping information back.⁴⁶

Ringgold’s observation could easily be applied to other contexts where textile-making offered an early record of violence, such as Chilean arpilleras.

Credited as her first story quilt, Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima? (1983)⁴⁷ uses 56 panels to tell an alternative narrative about the face of the American brand of pancake mix “reconfigured as a black feminist icon, a woman who prospered in business, who is attractive, youthful and nobody’s slave.”⁴⁸ Ringgold has described the quilt’s reception at the time as “very controversial” and explains that in her version of the story Aunt Jemima is an entrepreneur.⁴⁹ The text panels run from top to bottom, but read from right to left with the exception of the final panel, which is centred at the bottom of the quilt.⁵⁰ Panel 1 of the quilt reads:

Jemima Blakey (fig A) didn’t come from no ordinary people. Her Granma and Granpa bought they freedom out a slavery in New Orleans. Granma Jemima Blakey —they called her Aunt Jemima too—made cakes and catered fine parties for them plantation owners in Louisiana. And Granpa Blakey was a first class tailor too. From memory he could make a suit of clothes fit like a glove. They was sure smart people, them Blakeys. And Jemima was just like ’em, hard working, and God-fearing till the day she died.

The story goes on to tell of Jemima’s marriage to Big Rufus, despite her parents forbidding the match, her move to Tampa, Florida, and work as a house keeper until lightning, literally, strikes the house, leaving Jemima the only survivor. The lightning strike creates an inheritance for Jemima and Big Rufus, who move with their children to New York where they open a restaurant. The tale then twists and turns through the marriages of the couple’s children and a further move, this time to New Orleans, before Jemima and Big Rufus die in a car crash and their children inherit. Thalia Gouma-Peterson has credited this and many other of Ringgold’s storytelling quilts as examples of narratives that bring together “elements of folk lore and anecdote with the African and West African Dilemma Tale, traditions Ringgold had absorbed from her mother’s storytelling”, acknowledging that Ringgold’s stories tend to remain open-ended, rarely confirming a definitive conclusion or suggesting a single correct outcome.⁵¹ Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima? remains a curious mixture of fantasy and moral meaning, and starts a pattern that appears across a number of Ringgold’s storytelling quilts.

In Slave Rape Story Quilt (1985) “the text takes precedence over the images”,⁵² with a composition based around a wide-centred cross of white fabric with text filling all but the four most central squares that are filled with human figures instead.⁵³ The written story is longer than many other examples of Ringgold’s story quilts and tells of a mother and daughter travelling on the slave ship Cariolle, the mother’s suicide after giving birth, drowning her rapist with her, and what Gouma-Peterson reads as another open ending.⁵⁴ If Echoes of Harlem (1980) allowed Ringgold to recount through images her personal memories of individuals at a specific moment in history, Slave Rape Story Quilt (1985) relies much more heavily on the written word to convey a narrative.

A year later, The Purple Quilt (1986) is an unusual example of Ringgold clearly drawing her inspiration from another narrative: Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Color Purple (1982) and its subsequent film adaptation, directed by Steven Spielberg (1985). Main characters are painted in tall oblong blocks, with excerpts from Walker’s text included in panels of a similar format to the right and left of the mid-section of the quilt, framed by further characters’ torsos and tie-dyed blocks top and bottom.⁵⁵ Ringgold’s incorporation of Walker’s text is a strategy that does not appear often in her work. Exceptions are part 2 of the Jones Road series (2010), in which she quotes from notable historical figures: Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. Gouma-Peterson writes of The Purple Quilt, “In this work then, as in Slave Rape Story Quilt, Ringgold claims narrative authority for a triple Black female voice (her own, Alice Walker’s, and Celie’s [Walker’s main character]) to interpret women’s experience through an art form (the Quilt) that has often been considered a collective, anonymous creation.”⁵⁶

Walker herself has poignantly raised the issue of African-American quilters’ anonymity:

in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., there hangs a quilt unlike any other in the world […] Below this quilt I saw a note that says it was made by “an anonymous Black woman in Alabama, a hundred years ago.” If we could locate this “anonymous” black woman from Alabama, she would turn out to be one of our grandmothers—an artist who left her mark in the only materials she could afford, and in the only medium her position in society allowed her to use.⁵⁷

Showalter rightly points out that “Piecing and quilting were not anonymous arts, although the names and identities of quilt makers have frequently been supressed by contemporary art history and museum curatorship.”⁵⁸ But both Walker and hooks offer a warning against forgetting the circumstances of historical quilting traditions in African-American culture.

Six years after The Purple Quilt honours Walker’s authorial voice, Ringgold’s own written and quilted voices come together in Tar Beach (1988), a painted story quilt—now held in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum collection and the first in a series of five named Women on a Bridge—and a children’s book⁵⁹ with the same title (1991).⁶⁰ Narrated through the voice of eight-year-old Cassie Louise Lightfoot, Ringgold’s story recalls her childhood experience of summer evenings escaping the heat on the (tarred) rooftop of the apartment building where she lived as a child. Imagining her perspective high in the sky looking down on the rooftop and nearby George Washington Bridge, the narrator explains: “Sleeping on Tar Beach was magical. Lying on the roof in the night, with stars and skyscraper buildings all around me, made me feel rich, like I owned all that I could see. The bridge was my most prized possession.”⁶¹

The story goes on to recount the bridge’s opening date to be the same as Ringgold’s date of birth, her father’s construction work on the bridge followed by his experience of unemployment and exclusion from the union “because Grandpa wasn’t a member.”⁶² Hand-written text panels appear at the top and bottom of the quilt, while the book version is accompanied by additional illustrations.⁶³ Racism is not expunged from the narrative, but Ringgold has arrived at a didactic outlet through the format of children’s literature, which brings together elements of autobiography and fiction.

While Ringgold’s strategy of publishing on cloth began with work made during the 1980s, Michele Wallace reflects that the publication of Tar Beach (1991) followed by her memoir We Flew Over the Bridge (1995) “removed the urgency that she had initially felt to include her stories in her quilts”.⁶⁴ Nonetheless, it is not an artistic approach she abandoned. Coming to Jones Road Part 1 (1999-2000) and Part 2 (2009-2010), a series—even referred to as tankas in some of the part 2 work’s titles—of acrylic on canvas framed with fabric borders include text taken from notable historical figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, which create a background frame around each individual’s face. More recent works, particularly her French Connection series, continue to mix literary and artistic references.⁶⁵

Ringgold has continued to create paintings and textiles with political content. The acrylic canvases American Collection #1: We Came to America (1997)⁶⁶ and The American Collection #6: The Flag is Bleeding #2 (1997) depict, respectively, an ocean of black bodies swimming towards a black dreadlocked Statue of Liberty and an American flag dripping red blood and partially concealing a black woman who stands with two children holding on to her waist. Today, at nearly ninety years of age, she continues to make work, having earned the status of an established and celebrated artist. But the intersection of race and gender, in Ringgold’s case stereotypical assumptions, which first led her to publish on cloth, draw her work into a complex relationship with craft. Auther, whose section on Ringgold in String, Felt, Thread is titled “A Painter Who works in the Quilt Medium” acknowledges:

On the one hand, Ringgold’s invention of the unstretched, fabric-framed painted image represented a critique of the boundaries and hierarchies of the art world that affected her as an African-American female artist. On the other hand, the defensiveness of her insistence upon the label “painting” for these works when the value of their hybridity was questioned also reveals an equally significant investment in succeeding in that same art world. From Ringgold’s point of view, the goal of overcoming or breaking down the boundaries between art and craft important to a given work’s formal and political significance could only be carried out in the name of art.⁶⁷

Ringgold’s initial impetuous to publish on cloth came from a pressure to disclose a life of greater subjugation than she had experienced. The textile has provided a useful, and ultimately successful, route into the publishing world where she wanted her voice to be heard. The effectiveness of the importance she placed on her quilts being understood as art rather than craft is today much less clear. Instead Ringgold’s storytelling quilts mark a particular phase in her career – possibly as much of interest for what the led from, and to, than how they stand alone.