Photo Collection: Barbara when she was sleek and fit

MJ-2005-1212, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

1981 in the little house I rented in New Haven. Barbara is 28 I think since it is Christmas apparently. Photo taken by I am not sure whom. Perhaps it was me with Barbara's camera. She lived with me in New Haven briefly.

Photo-Essay: Michele on The Terrace in 1978

Terrace09, originally uploaded by olympia2x.  Photograph by Barbara Wallace.  All rights reserved.  Michele Wallace Collection. 

These pictures were taken by my sister Barbara in the summer of 1978 when I was still teaching Journalism at NYU and had just completed the manuscript of Black Macho and The Myth of the Superwoman.

It was a lovely little apartment, a studio with a kitchen, a bathroom and a rather extensive dressing room with shelves and closets with shutters that I particularly liked. All parket floors. I could have remained in the apartment well after having left the employ of NYU but foolishly sublet the apartment to a real clown when I moved to New Haven and he simply walked away from it without paying the rent, without telling anyone. When I discovered what had happened, I had already been evicted. It was all I could do to pay the outstanding rent and achieve financial closure so that debt would not be hanging over my head. I lived at WSquare Village for about 3 years and there were many adventures, many parties, quite a few romances, about which the less said, the better.

Photo Essay: Coming To Jones Road

This is myself and Barbara standing before one of the key images of Coming to Jones Road, a theme extensively represented in the exhibition.  Mom did the series Coming to Jones Road to commemorate the awful difficulty she had in getting to build the studio she wanted on the Jones Road property she purchased in 1992.  Her white neighbors banded together and hired a lawyer to try to prevent her from completing her plan of adding a studio to her acre large property on the hill in Englewood, New Jersey.  The subsequent struggle, which did not result in the building and modifications of the property until 1999, inspired her to return to the issue of how black people had escaped slavery--sometimes leaving in large groups and taking back roads to their destination and freedom.  

New Jersey continued to have slavery right up until the end of the Civil War but much of it was rural and it probably always had pockets of resistance and refuge for slaves who had escaped the South.  Sometimes this is called the Underground Railroad, which became all the more a necessity as the Supreme Court upheld Fugitive Slave Laws and the awful Dred Scott decision, whereupon fleeing slaves might stop briefly in a remote location and then continue on toward Canada where they might be free.  In Coming to Jones Road, Mom has explored ad infinitum the theme of resistance with your feet headed toward freedom in a rural America.  

Englewood is really no longer a rural idyll although sometimes it can look like one.  There are lots of places that are still almost wild.

Photo Collection: My Photo Sets on Flickr and Zenfolio

 Zenfolio Collection

Flickr Collection

I am including here links to the family photos collections I have uploaded onto Flickr and Zenfolio for reference.  All of these photos are limited in their use by the copyright of Faith Ringgold.  They are currently available at these addresses on Flickr for research and/or genealogical investigation, primarily not in large formats.

We have many more but this is a healthy group made up of photos from the teens through the 90s of myself, my sister, my Aunt, my mother, dad and grandmother Mme. Willi Posey, as well as some reproductions of the art of Faith Ringgold.

Photo-Essay: The Judson 3 and The 1970s

Jean Toche,Faith Ringgold and Jon Hendricks

312-29-021671001R, originally uploaded by Jan van Raay.

The Judson 3 in front of the Federal Court Building. Feb 16, 1971.  Photo by Jan Van Raay.
It is difficult for me to imagine that anyone who knows our family could be unaware of the events surrounding the Judson 3.  It became so crucial to who we would become as a unit, what the future would hold, particularly after MJ's death.  In any case, MJ never participated in events like this and did not approve of Faith's arrest.  MJ was somebody who thought that being a mother over-ruled all other activity on the planet for women.  It may have been that Barbara and I were brought along on mother's protest activities as much because she needed to keep an eye on us as for any political perspectives or inclinations of our own.  Protests with Art Worker's Coalition and Lucy Lippard and the Judson 3 formed our family outings, and some of the times that I can remember we were happiest together.
In 1970, a People's Flag Show was given by a Committee of artists at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square Park.  The show included all kinds of artists all of them lampooning the notion of the American flag as a sacred symbol.   John Hendricks and John Toche, who formed the Guerrilla Art Action Theatre and the Belgian Government in Exile, were also involved with Faith in the planning of the Flag Show.
There was a poster that was designed by Faith and made to commemorate and advertise the show.  I wrote the words on the poster as a representative of WSABAL (Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation), which Faith and I had founded a black feminist art activist group.  The show opened.  Faith, John Hendricks and Jon Toche were arrested by the District Attorney's office for desecration of the flag and the show was forced to close.  Thier case was known as that of the Judson 3.
The pictures assembled here are by the photographer Jan Van Raay of various events linked to the case: protests outside the court house, benefits to raise money for the Civil Liberty's Union which took the case, and an evening during the show itself.  My sister Barbara and I are in several of the ones I have chosen to reproduce here.  There are many more Judson 3 photos and photos of other art world activism at the time at Jan Van Raay's photostream on Flickr, which can be found at http://www.flickr.com/people/janvanraay.

Photo Collection: Mom and Barbara with Judson 3

298-14a-120170001R, originally uploaded by Jan van Raay.

Mom in mink hat and coat by MJ. Barbara in sunglasses behind her.  Photo by Jan Van Raay.