T he Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, 1991 is lauded as one of Faith Ringgold’s most important works, and as such is presently a key piece in the collection of Oprah Winfrey. The work is the fourth piece in Ringgold’s French Collection, a series of 12 story quilts, that “uses a combination of painted images, narrative text, and decorative borders to explore the often absent role of African-American women in the art-world, particularly in Paris during the 1920s.” (Ellen C. Caldwell, “Power in the Painting: Faith Ringgold and her Story Quilts” JSTOR Daily, 18 March 2016).

In it, eight prominent historical African American figures—Madam CJ Walker, Sojourner Truth, Ida Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Ella Baker—come together as the self-proclaimed “Sunflower Quilters Society of America” to together weave a quilt of sunflowers they date as March 22, 1922. A date which falls shortly after the long suffragist movement that placed the Nineteenth Amendment into federal law on August 18, 1920. The later date chosen by Ringgold, therefore, is likely meant to demonstrate the continuing difficulties of African American women’s suffrage and rights in general, as the quilt being weaved in this work by landmark female figures in African American history also reads “An International Symbol of Our Dedication to Change the World” on the right edge.

This quilt of sunflowers is being woven amidst a field of sunflowers in the french city of Arles, known as the longtime home of Vincent Van Gogh, whose name in art history has become synonymous with sunflowers as a subject. In Ringgold’s quilt, Van Gogh stands holding his infamous 1988 still life, Sunflowers, slightly apart from the group of women working on the quilt, imbuing Ringgold’s work with layers of meaning the artist hints at in the narrative text included along the edges of the quilt, which reads:

As such, the sunflowers for these freedom-fighting women becomes a symbol of freedom itself, and Ringgold places them in a city and in relationship to a person associated historically with sunflowers, a great motif of art history. In doing so, Ringgold comments on the various kinds of freedoms the artist has spent her life and career dedicated to, that is: black liberation, women’s liberation, and freedom from the art historical cannon that is based on those things, and that has long dictated what is art. This is deeply personal to the artist, as among the contentions Ringgold suffered in her lifetime was a questioning of her use of media and the limits of “fine art,” most notably after beginning to create works with fabrics in the early 1970s but with the deliberate intention to designate them as fine art and not craft.

Thusly, the present drawing, Study After The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, is an important and supremely rare drawing by Ringgold, executed in 1996 as the basis for a 1996 edition of lithographs the artist would release in 1996, the variants from which would find place in the permanent collections of various esteemed public collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Polk Museum of Art at Florida State University, the Allen Memorial Art Museum and the museum at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, among others.

In the present drawing, as in the editioned series, a ninth female figure is pictured at the quiltworking table at the lower left—Ringgold’s fictional heroine Willia Marie Simone, who while absent in the original 1991 quilt, narrates the story of the Sunflower quilters in 12 parts around the edges of the quilt. According to the activist and writer Michele Wallace, who is also the artist’s daughter, Willia Marie appeared as the protagonist of The French Collection series the artist embarked upon on her 60th birthday in 1990 while in residence at Chateau de La Napoule in the south of France. Partly modeled on Ringgold’s own mother, Willi, Willia Marie goes to France as a young woman and marries a wealthy Frenchman with whom she has two children. When her husband passes, he leaves her well-off and with the ability to pursue her passion to become a painter when she sends her children to be raised by their Aunt Melissa, and so ensue her adventures throughout France illustrated throughout the various quilts of The French Collection. Notably throughout this series Willa Marie meets or is surrounded by important historical figures, many of which are artists (Michele Wallace, "Black Power," Faith Ringold, pp. 53-54).

Stories and narrative play a pivotal role throughout Ringgold’s body of work, which includes several books: a memoir and 17 children’s books. Wallace recounts how one of the original reasons for Ringgold turning towards narrative quilts was as an alternative means of publication after a famous feminist literary agent told the artist that the memoir she had written, We Flew Over the Bridge, was not her story. But quiltmaking of course has many other associations and meanings which contribute to Ringgold’s unique style of painting - among these is the importance of the craft as an art central to African American culture historically.

Quiltmaking is more often associated as a domestic tradition, frequently a communal activity that historically acted also as a way of storytelling and is here further emphasized both in the imagery of the quilt itself and during the hours the women spent together sewing. Ringgold began making painted quilts in the 1980s, partially because they subvert and challenge the cultural hegemony of European and white artistic activity. Her first quilt Echoes of Harlem, 1980, was made in collaboration with the artist's mother, who came from a quiltmaking tradition that included her mother's grandmother and great grandmother, who were both born slaves and continued to both be dressmakers in Jacksonville, Florida around the turn of the century (Michele Wallace, "Black Power," Faith Ringgold, p. 50).

In The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, the presence of historically-trailblazing women as they create a work of art in the form of a quilt to inspire change is in stark contrast to the onlooking Van Gogh—the distance between them symbolizing the distance the art cannon has placed between the ‘white male genius’ and the art of African American quiltwork. At the same time, their presence together among the sunflowers is hopeful, as it is in fact one of rewriting. They are placed on an equal plane as they all use sunflowers to inspire change, both in and out of art itself and the art world.

Artist

Faith Ringgold