The quilts are huge and delightful even as their stories are sometimes grim. I wanted to touch them, to feel them, to hang out with them for a very long time. The pinnacle of the exhibit for me were the rooms filled with what have become her defining art form: story quilts. Here was the story of triumph and and celebration. Here was the art world critiqued through a Black woman artist’s lens. Here was color, bold and fierce, pain, laughter and love, images of places and people we recognized and others we were meeting for the first time. Here was Black feminist artist Faith Ringgold recovering and revealing the truth of Black American women’s lives and realities. Here was the life work of a woman who fought and succeeded to do what she loved in spite of all the odds, and so many obstacles in her way. Here were stories rarely told, painted, stitched and written onto colorful quilts. It was as though we had left hell and entered heaven. A story told too many times.Įxiting the black hole of Ramses, we took the elevator up to the Ringgold retrospective. A celebration of war and the spoils of war. It was history as told through the story of the victor. It didn’t take long for us to want to get away from the constant sound of war drums and battlefield chants pumping through the speakers, the propaganda of how great Ramses was because of his victories as a warrior at war.

We may as well walk through, we thought, to see what all the brouhaha is about. You must go.” And so, for my 60th birthday I headed there with a friend.Īrriving at the museum, we noticed the “Ramses the Great and Egyptian Treasures” exhibit which had been publicized ad nauseam for months. Someone told me to go see the exhibit “Faith Ringgold: American People” at the de Young museum in San Francisco.

Faith ringgold tar beach quilt