Faith Ringgold, quilting as art

As someone who’s grown up with quilts and has been working on one for a couple of years, but can’t get around to working on it, I was excited to read about Faith Ringgold. As an African-American artist she uses “rich textiles, gorgeous colors and complex designs-a transgressive hybrid if there ever was one-to make mordant points about the politics of race and gender.” Ringgold is a prominent woman in Contemporary art, and through her work with quilts she made “women’s work” a valid form of art. One quilt which caught my attention was the quilt entitled “We Came to America” from 1997, click here. It shows a burning ship in the background of the quilt, and surrounding are slaves are trying to stay afloat and swimming desperately. In the foreground is the Statue of Liberty, holding a child. What is interesting is that the torch that Lady Liberty is holding is creating a cloud of smoke which drifts over towards the flaming ship. The images of the drowning slaves and the expressions on their faces are haunting, as they were forced from their homeland to come here.

The quote above is from the book Bad Girls by Marcia Tucker which was an exhibit at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.

You can check out the rest of her work here.
I thought this was interesting. I also found a video of Faith Ringgold talking about her children's coloring book which is about attempting to be color blind entitled, How the People Became Colorblind.