Faith Through The Struggles

Artist and author, Ringgold still inciting change

Faith Ringgold
Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold is 85 years old.

She is a college graduate, a teacher, an artist, an author, an activist, a parent and the guest of honor at this weekend's Distinguished Speaker Series at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. She has a list of awards and honors that fill up a web page -- including the Coretta Scott King Award and a Caldecott Honor -- and has her work in collections as prestigious as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the High Museum of Fine Art and the Guggenheim.

FAQ

Distinguished Speaker Series:

Faith Ringgold

WHEN — 7 p.m. today

WHERE — Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville

COST — $10 for nonmembers

INFO — 657-2335

She did all those things as a woman and an African American, in times when it was a challenge just to be one or the other.

In 1948, for example, she went to City College of New York to register but was about to be turned away for being female.

"Into the office comes this woman, and she said, 'I can solve this,'" Ringgold remembers. "She'll major in art and minor in education so she can be an art teacher. I said, 'Oh my God.' It never occurred to me that I could be a teacher, even though my family was full of teachers."

Her parents, she says, "didn't like that art business too much, but what they did like was teaching. So I said great, majored in art, minored in education, got a degree, got a license in teaching art in high school, and everybody was very happy. And I loved teaching. Kids are so wonderful as artists."

In 1959, Ringgold finished a master's degree in art, also at City College of New York; in 1961, she traveled to Europe for the first time, touring museums in Paris, Nice, Florence and Rome; and in 1963, she spent the summer at Martha's Vineyard, starting her "The American People" series of oil paintings.

That's when she discovered some things hadn't changed.

In 1964, she lobbied for admission to Spiral, a black artists group, and to exhibit in the first Black Arts Festival in Senegal. She was turned away because she was female.

She couldn't get her autobiography published, either, in essence because her story wasn't African American enough. She grew up in Harlem with loving parents, and her sister went to college before her -- no tales of rape, abuse or suffering.

"Who was she, this literary agent," Ringgold says with outrage still simmering, "to say she was not interested in publishing my story because she didn't like the story I was telling about who I am and my life? I think that is the essence of inequality -- that other people can decide who and what you are."

Denied the right to tell her story in a book, Ringgold set out to find "a way around this."

"So what I did was find a way to get published without the consent of anybody like her. How do I do that? I could write my story on my art," she says. "I was already getting published as an artist. So I could write my story and publish my art at the same time.

"So instead of painting on canvas and stretching the canvas, I painted on canvas and backed the canvas with a backing and made it into a quilt. That's how I got published. I just went around them," she says. "The first quilt I did didn't get the point across necessarily. But when I did 'Tar Beach,' it opened the door for me to publish my first children's book. Random House liked it and wanted to publish it as a book. So it worked. Today I've got 18 children's books, and I've written books for adults as well -- but my autobiography didn't get published until 1995.

"It's gotten better for me, but I haven't stopped struggling," she says. "It's not over. The situation continues. The freedom to be me. The freedom to tell my story. That to me is what it is to be an artist -- that nobody can dictate to me who and what I am."

NAN What's Up on 03/18/2016

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