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Faith Ringgold (American) b. 1930, The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, 1991
Acrylic on canvas, tie dyed, pieced fabric border, 74 X 80”, Private Collection
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch) 1853-1890“Sunflowers” 1888. Oil on Canvas, 36 X28” National Gallery, London
Faith Ringgold Vincent Van Gogh
• In The Quilting Bee at Arles, Ringgold depicts a number of famous black women from different time periods called together by Aunt Melissa for an imaginary quilting bee.
• The location of this quilting bee is the southern French town of Arles, where Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) had painted his famous still life, The Sunflowers (1888).
• Even though his works have become some of the most famous and best loved in the world, van Gogh could not sell his art while he was alive.
• Ringgold uses the figure of van Gogh to symbolize the Western stereotype of a great artist as a lone male genius.
• She sees a parallel in the tragic life of van Gogh to the sometimes-tragic lives of the notable black women she has chosen to depict.
• Each of these women took a stand on their own for freedom. Like the work of van Gogh, their brave and difficult commitment to equality was justified over the course of time.
• The women are pictured as quilters in order to piece together a better world, perhaps suggesting the value of collaboration versus the lone individual.
• Content is the message the artwork communicates. It is the meaning of the work.
Those portrayed are: • Madame C.J. Walker, the first self-made, American-born female
millionaire (inventor of the hair-straightening comb) and a woman who gave her money to educational causes;
• Sojourner Truth could neither read nor write, but spoke brilliantly regarding women’s rights during slavery;
• Ida B. Wells exposed the horrors of lynching in the South. • Fannie Lou Hamer braved great odds to register thousands of people
to vote; • Harriet Tubman, who brought over 300 slaves to freedom on the
Underground Railroad during the era of slavery in the U.S.; • Rosa Parks, whose refusal to sit at the back of a segregated bus
ignited the U.S. civil rights protests of the 1950s and 1960s; • Mary McLeod Bethune founded Bethune Cookman College and was
an advisor to Presidents Truman and Roosevelt; and • Ella Baker organized thousands of people to improve the condition of
poor housing, jobs, and consumer education.
