Photo-Essay: Faith Ringgold: On The Necessity of Primitivism to the Blues Tradition

Faith is describing the superstructure mask, originally uploaded by Barbara Company.

This is Faith describing how she made the superstructure for her mask of Aunt Edith. Barbara Wallace, my sister took this picture at her talk at Rutger's.

This image links to more photos of the masks Faith Ringgold made with her mother's help before either of them had been to Africa (early 70s I think). I think Momma Jones (Willi Posey) may have gone to Africa first. Both were always intrepid travelers.

Faith has done a great deal of soft sculpture and masks in the course of her 50 year career as an artist. This work is well documented in the writings of art historian Lisa Farrington and in Dancing at the Louvre edited by Dan Cameron (University of California Press 1990) and others, but not necessarily widely seen otherwise. This soft sculptural work, which can be seen now at ACA Gallery in Chelsea, will be featured in exhibitions coming up this year and next year at ACA, Rutger's University and other venues.

Photo copyright Faith Ringgold and photo by Barbara Wallace at ACA GAlleries.

All of which I mention in order to provide the necessary background for understanding this quote from Faith's autobiography, which seems particularly appropriate to the topic of Blues People:

I came back from Africa with ideas for a new mask face, more primitive than any I had ever done before. Primitive is a word I use in a positive way to explain the completeness of a concept in art. I like to layer and pattern and embellish my art in the manner of tribal art, and then, like a blues singer, I like to repeat and repeat it again. Fragmented, understated, or minimalist art forms frustrate me. I want to finish them. In the 1960s there was a minimalist aesthetic advocating "less is more." To me, less is even less and more is still not quite enough. I was now using feathers and beads as never before. I had been to the African source of my own "classical" art forms and now I was set free.

Quotation from WE FLEW OVER THE BRIDGE by Faith Ringgold

Artist, Children's Author and mother of Michele Wallace, Your Teacher

Photo Essay: Black Macho and The Myth of The Superwoman 1970s

The inside first page of the cover story in Ms. January of 1979.  The double excerpt from BLACK MACHO AND THE MYTH OF THE SUPERWOMAN (The Dial Press 1979).

The picture by the celebrated and brilliant black photographer Anthony Barboza.  I have always wondered why he never exhibits this picture.  I guess he is ashamed of it.  But it is one of my prized possessions.  I got the people at Ms. to give me the print they used and one  day I gotta get Tony to sign it or whatever photographers do in a case like that.  The only stupid thing is that it was 11 x 14 which seemed to me awkward.  So what did homey do?  She cut maybe an inch or two off the bottom.  Stupidly, I think they call it these days. 

    In the summer of 1978, my first book BLACK MACHO AND THE MYTH OF THE SUPERWOMAN was at the publisher, receiving the final touches from my editor Joyce Johnson at The Dial Press and n search of a marketing strategy among the sales force. Meanwhile, MS MAGAZINE had purchased the first serial rights for a double excerpt that would (if I played my cards right and my hair, as it turned out) be featured on the cover of the magazine in January of 1979.

The way the game played out from then on until the publication was largely determined by two opposing forces, as I now see it 30 years later. On one side were the feminists at Ms. Magazine, and on the other were the anti-feminists at the Dial Press. Ms. Magazine was then run by an editorial collective which included most significantly for my cover, Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker, Robin Morgan and Mary Thom. That summer or perhaps a bit earlier Ms. Magazine hired Susan McHenry, fresh from a position with the editorial staff at Harvard University Press. She was young, about a year older than me (I was 26) and most importantly she was black. At the time, MS had no high level black editorial staff who was fully participant. Alice was crucial editorially for me and lots of other people but she was first and last a writer who was in the office maybe a day or two and always held herself far above anything ugly or pedestrian. 

Unfortunately, I wasn't quite wise enough to follow her judicious careful lead. In any case, Susan worked closely with me as I recall (and became from that day to this a close personal friend) along with in particular my old friend and associate Robin Morgan (but whom I haven't seen or spoken with in years).

Gloria also wasn't involved on a day-to-day level but I had lunch with her and Alice at least twice during this period. Moreover, they both generously participated in an advance public reading to the feminist community at The Feministfw Salon, which was then located at Wesbeth. Gloria was there as was every other significant luminary on the then New York Feminist scene. My good fortune was that my sister Barbara Wallace took meticulous pictures of the gathering and as such I have a perfect visual record of the whole event. Most of the people there I didn't know at the time. Over the years I've met them all.

Alice and Robin Morgan introduced me and I read excerpts from my book. At the time, Alice wrote me several deeply encouraging handwritten letters of support (which I still have) in which she did, however, give me some crucial advice about last minute changes I should seek in the final draft of the book.  As I recall the two particulars were to seek more knowledge of the history of struggle in African American communities via Vincent Harding in particular.  The other piece of advice was to write more about black women writers, in particular such figures as Pauline Hopkins and Frances Harper who were virtually unknown.  This advice was not followed although it has shaped my career as a writer, a feminist and intellectual ever since. 

The celebrated cover from the book which shaped my 80s and indeed all the rest of my life until this day.  

Not to excuse myself at all from responsibility for what was and was not in the book but the power struggle between these two constituent elements of feminists (white actually) was a determining factor in the kind of reception I got. The other side of the equation was the anti-feminists at The Dial Press, in particular one brilliant anti-feminist named Joyce Johnson who was my editor and who all but breastfed me through every stage of the writing and the completion of the book for publication. I call her an anti-feminist not out of any malice but I don't know how else to put it. She and the others opposed the use of the word feminist in connection with the book, on the publicity materials, on the book jacket, and in every aspect of the packaging or promotion of the book. Feminism they said would kill the book because feminism was finished and done with. 

There weren't going to be any more important feminist books so there wasn't any point in dooming my project to abject obscurity in this manner. The feminist movement was over, not that it didn't have some merits but the represenatives were clueless about everything that mattered. Women would find another way to pursue their rights, if at all. 

These white women seemed to be as convinced they were already liberated as a lot of black women I knew. Of course everything black, black women, black feminism, black whatever was sure death to a book because as everyone in publishing knew, black people did not read and they did not buy books. I was told this by one and all repeatedly.

The average reader and buyer of books was the little old lady from Pasadena, I think it was.. In any case, she was white. And to show you what kind of shape we were in in 1979, nobody really could prove otherwise. Blackness had come and gone with the popularity of black cultural nationalism, just as feminism had come and gone. Of course they were right about feminism, which I still don't understand. 

Blackness they seriously got that one wrong. And indeed my book would prove it. I probably had the largest black reading audience anyone had ever had for a first nonfiction book by an "unknown." Nevermind for a "black feminist." I was one of the people who broke that wall. I went out on one tour for the little old ladies in Pasadena. Then I went on another one that stretched out for six months to every major black reading market.  Nobody in the publishing industry seemed to know that there was even such a thing but they continued to clamour for me. The only bestseller list I ever really had traction on was the Washington Post Bestseller List, guess why? It got so I felt like I was practically living in D.C. I went there so much.  I often appeared at black venues generally. I almost never said no so that was no problem. 

I had quit my job teaching journalism at New York University at the end of the spring 1978 semester.  I had some vague idea that I could make it as a freelancer.  My Mom's lecture agent, Lordly and Dame, who was then handling her, black feminist Flo Kennedy and a hot set of black luminaries, got me lecture dates which from that time provided at least half of my income until I began teaching full time at the University of California at San Diego as a Visiting Lecturer in 1984 as companion to my Mom who began her stint as Professor of Art there at the same time. But I am getting ahead of myself.

From the summer of 1978 through the spring of 1984, I would go all the way from alpha to omega.

Everything after that up until the initial release of the book was influenced by this fierce struggle, which at 27 and black, I felt powerless to address or to contain. Later on there got to be a third component in the struggle (my Mom) and almost immediately after that a fourth (the men I was dating) but that's completely in Act 2.

This is a polaroid from a story that a black hair magazine did on my hair, which was at the time pretty unique (I think it was just me in Bo Derek--I am kidding, no e-mails!).  My mother designed this hairstyle for me and the fixtures that made it possible.  These were my braids wrapped in that waxy black cord that African women use to make their twists with a bead knotted at each end.  I taught my favorite hairdresser who came to my house to do it.  I felt safest when my hair was like this but none of the publicity people of either camp like it.  Take it out!  Take it out!  The other thing I liked to do, which they hated was to wear a scarf over it.  Hate it!  I wore a scarf on the Today Show.  Okay so I was also chewing gum.  So shoot me.  I was interviewed by Tom Brokaw.  I bought my first tv so that I could watch it and my other television appearances.  It was my first book promo and it was crazy but I am getting ahead of myself. 

Anyhow I've kept these pictures all these years.  I love these polaroids.  Photographers always made them on shoots so I started asking for them because they usually threw them away.

  

This polaroid is from the Essence shoot.  There was a major story in Essence written by Marcia Gillespie who was then editor-in-chief.  Little did I suspect that she was going to tear me a new one.  She's somebody I had lunch with all summer before the book came out too.  (At least she didn't drop me after it was over like some.  Dropped me like a hot rock, like my sister likes to say).  But the pictures were great.  For some reason they shot me both in black and white and color and in two different dresses.  I forgot to say, Essence liked the braids.  In fact, the black folk liked the braids.  Thank god. Of course, I had my own make-up person who was also then doing Natalie Cole's make-up.  That was the most fun shoot I ever did.  We balled (as Aunt Barbara would say), at that shoot.  Was the photographer black or white?  Gotta check that.  Essence always used the best unlike our friends at Ms, who could be uneven.  

    Meanwhile here comes this excerpt, which I actually think is excellent now that I am re-reading it for the first time in 30 years, I mean really reading it. It's tight, it is to the point and I pretty much agree with everything in it. They shaved many a rough spot from the actual book, including a diatribe or two about this and that which I sincerely wish I had never written. Either that, or that somebody had prevented it from being included in the final book, including the crazy quote on the cover of the book with the statement about how black man and women hated each other. Yes I wrote it, but that damn cover design and everything on it was the nightmare vision of the cover depart, the sales force and publicity. More about the quote later.

But the cover of Ms. with the cover lines about the book that would shape the 80s, as well as the quotes from Robin Morgan, Alice Walker, and Alice Walker which graced the back of the book were Ms.'s brilliant invention all alone. Joyce and the others at Dial did what they did to slow it down. The first blurb that came in the door was from somebody I didn't yet know but who would become a pretty good friend, Ishmael Reed. He loved the book for all sorts of reasons including the fact that he was then raising a real homegirl daughter who he was trying to keep on the straight and narrow. He wrote the blurb from that emotional place and with that inimitable energy that is Ishmael Reed's alone. It came in the door first and The Dial Press wanted to go with it alone, a one shot blast covering the inside leaves, the back of the book, everything. He was Joyce's kind of writer and Joyce had been editor to Amiri Baraka's HOME ( collection of essays), Eldridge Cleaver's SOUL ON ICE and Harold Cruse's CRISIS OF THE NEGRO INTELLECTUAL. We spent many an afternoon when I was blocked with her telling me the stories about working with these guys, in particular Cruse whose book fascinated me then.

She was sick and tired of their crap about women and so was I so when I wrote BLACK MACHO first, which took me maybe a month or two (it just poured out) to write, she took one look at it and announced that instead of the 10 chapter book on black women I had planned, this essay would be the key and title essay with perhaps one other companion essay on black women. I called it The Myth of the Superwoman, and it took me the balance of two years to finish it. Rather Joyce finished it for me because she kept insisting that it wasn't finished and that it needed more work in this manner that editors will always do. More work, more work, more work. She wouldn't write a single word. This was her way of showing her respect for my writing abilities she said. In the end, I cried so hard about not being able to go on one day that she did a massive edit in particular on the second part of Myth of a Superwoman, which was one of the historical sections.

Joyce oversaw and supervised the battle against the citation of my sources in either a bibliography, footnotes or even an index. I still don't know whether they were just cheap or whether they were trying to destroy the rest of my life on purpose. But in any case, this was as it would be. But she would not have her way on the characterization of me a black feminist on either the publicity material or on the book jacket. The media did the rest.

Final story, although there is a million others. when we shot the cover for Ms., it was understood that I had only a rat's chance of ever seeing the color. I was nobody, black women were rarely featured on magazine covers then and my book had no news hook so it likely wasn't going to happen unless I followed every instruction and did exactly as I was told. At the shoot, instruction one. Take those braids out of your hair. They will ruin the cover. This the hairdresser did. But I didn't know what to do with my hair under such circumstances so you see instead that unruly hair style I had where my hair is being I am not sure what. If it looks like my face is covered with makeup, it is, as the makeup artist applied layer after layer of a various assortment of foundations trying, I can see now, to somehow brighten my hopelessly olive blackness. People say this is a beautiful picture but I can't see it. I hated it.

But there it was in December of 1979 on every newstand in New York with that inflammatory announcement that it would be the book to shape the 80s. I am not sure I will ever live that down but then I didn't say it. The person who did say it, Gloria Steinem, found a way to publically withdraw it by blurbing my Mom's autobiography, WE FLEW OVER THE BRIDGE with Little Brown in 1990.

And thus begun the craziest most exciting time of my life, the year of 1979. At the time, I had no idea whether it was going to be like that from then on or how whether it was going to be different, less more or what.

This is one of a series of pictures of me taken by the photographer for Emerge in January of 1979 in connection with a piece on the book written by Paula Giddings.  She tore me a new one too and then went on and wrote the definitive book on black feminism, WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER.  Still the classic I think.  Don't remember the name of the photographer but he was black and he said let's just go over the park (Washington Square Park--I lived in the village then) and shoot some stuff for the fun of it. It was cold as you know what and my hair was blowing.  I am thinking, this guy has got issues but let's just get through this.  It took about 15 minutes for him to shoot about a 10o pictures, the prints of which he gave me and which I still have.   Fun and this is me with normal make-up then, which was no make-up, or just mascara, eyeliner and lipstick.

Mom and Dad at Mom's surprise birthday party at 345 in Harlem.  October 8th, 1979, in the thick of it.  

Photo-Essay: MJ, Mr. Morrison and Mom at the Lenox Terrace 1970s

MJ with her husband, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

This picture taken by my sister Barbara in 1977 during our usual family gatherings for the holidays captures very much what my life was before 1981 when my grandmother died. She served as an anchor for the kind of life I had and somehow imagined I would always have. From 1979 when Black Macho was published until 1981 when she finally died, that world shattered all to pieces never to assume its former shape again. The absense of just a few people can alter your life forever. This is the thing one must learn and know about death, that it is constantly altering the shape and reality of the world we live in. One must constantly leave a place for it, be flexible about its constant arrivals. I know it sounds a little miserable but actually it isn't. 
It is just real.

Photo Collection: Excerpt from my Ms Cover of 1979

Photo by Anthony Barboza, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

The excerpt is a thing of beauty to read.  Perfect in every respect except that it softens a number of the rougher edges, in particular the critique of white women.  The other edge it softened, which was much appreciated, was its critique of various black writers including Nikki Giovanni and Angela Davis.  I love both of these ladies, always did in truth.  They are  fierce. The picture is heaven although  I know it wasn't heaven for Mom.  She felt like she got the shaft.  I KNOW I did.

Photo-Essay: Mom and Dad 1970s

Mom and Dad II, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

This is Mom and Dad back in the day at 409 Edgecombe Avenue. The year is 1977.
My Dad is Burdette Ringgold.  My mother Faith and he were married in 1962.  In 1963, we all moved from the Bronx to 145th Street, where for the first time we had enough rooms for one of them to be devoted to a studio for my Mom's art work.  Barbara and I shared the largest bedroom which had its own toilet attached, separate from the larger master bathroom.
My sister and I switched that fall from Our Savior Lutheran School in the Bronx to New Lincoln School on 110th Street and Central Park North.  And what a switch that was.

First, a new Dad.  Then a new school and a new neighborhood.  I was definitely reeling from the culture shock, thoroughly intimidated by my new surroundings.
And then in November of 1963, while Barbara and I were still scrambling to adjust to New Lincoln's distinctly secular and progressive approach to education in which, for example, we called our teachers by their first names, something truly awful happened, something I can no longer really imagine but rather can only recollect based upon previous recollections ad infinitum.
I suppose the best thing about it was that I was a child and therefore had nothing to compare it to.  But I can still remember something of the physical landscape of that day,  that it was in the fall and I recall, the leaves were already turning.
When 9-11 happened in 2001, as it happened I was again living in the same building on 145th Street in Harlem where we had lived then.  I thought of that previous day when President Kennedy had been shot and idly wondered if the experiences of school children were anything like the way it was for us.  I hoped that it was because I remember only that I felt very protected when Kennedy was shot, not at all in any kind of  personal danger.  But then Jack Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas which from my point-of-view at that time might as well have been Oz for all I knew about its connection to the part of the United States in which I was living.
The school day ceased to progress in a manner that was then entirely invisible to me but which I would always recognize from then on in times of emergency in educational settings.   The announcement was made in a quiet and dignified way that the President, John F. Kennedy was shot, and I had occasion to recall this in particular recently when reading a reminiscence of that very same day written by my former 7th grade teacher, Helen Myers.  It was good to learn that even though I had been only 11 years old that I had still gotten the essentials right.
    I can't remember then how long it was from the announcement of his shooting to the announcement of his death, or whether I received any further information until I was actually with my parents but I remember that the next order of business was getting us home as quickly as possible where my family (and I guess I would assume all the other children's families) remained glued to our black and white television sets and the two or three television stations we then had for the duration, which I would guess extended over a period of days.
    In the Christian tradition, getting a head of state properly buried, particularly if it also happens that he was assassinated while in office, was I would guess a protracted process, not a simple matter.  And children are easily amazed at how long adults can take to do such things at such times.  I think I can recall some aspects of the processional apparently patterned after that of Abraham Lincoln as called for by his widow, Jacqueline Kennedy.
     I don't know if I actually remember seeing John John saluting his father's coffin that day or whether it is all the times I have seen it replayed in various forms.  What stands out in my mind since then is that he wore those short pants that little boys up to a certain age were sometimes dressed in, and that that same boy became a man who died only a year after his own mother died of cancer.
    From 1963 to 1977 was not such a very long time.  Malcolm X was shot in 1965 and that was a highly personal occasion because it happened in Harlem and my family lived in Harlem.  My parents and everybody I knew were deeply affected by his death.  His processional, viewing and funeral all took place in Harlem.  Then Robert F. Kennedy was shot in 1968, and this isn't to say that a great many other things didn't happen in between these dates, including the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. as well but I run the chronology through my mind if not daily, certainly often enough just so I won't ever forget the order in which things happened.
    I asked my Dad whether he was sent home on that day, whether they closed the line down at General Motors in Tarrytown when John F. Kennedy got killed.  He said they did.  I asked because I know they rarely closed the line down and his coming home from work without completing his day was something that only happened on fewer days than I can count on one hand during the time he worked there.   He then mentioned, as well, that he had come home early on the day that Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot but this time without authorization from the bureaucracy.  I gather the black workers, including him, refused to work.  His punishment was a 3 day suspension.  So much for the widespread love and respect for MLK in 1968.  But he says they didn't close the line down for Robert Kennedy either.  What a crazy time.

   Then I graduated from high school in 1969, went to Mexico during the first half of the summer, did not want to ever return to the United States but had to anyway, then spent the second half of the summer in the Sisters of the Good Sheppard Residence for girls in need of supervision across the street from Beth Israel Hospital in 17th Street.
Then I went to Howard University for one semester in the fall of 1969, personally delivered by my Mom with a suitcase full of new clothes and brand new bank account at the Howard University's campus bank.  Dad came to visit me sometime in the fall, was shocked at the free floating cattle market on display on the campus green right outside my dorm, which had just started to allow boys to visit on weekends, and advised Mom to bring me home immediately.
    I was back in New York at the City College of New York by February of 1970, working as an account adjuster at Best & Company during the day and attending night school.  I truly loved that job at Best & Company but they soon went out of business forever.  In 1974, I graduated from the City College of New York with a major in English and Creative Writing, under the careful tutelage of my mentor Mark Mirksy, now my colleague.
The summer of my graduation, the same summer in which Richard Nixon was impeached, I was working as a secretary in the office of the Editor-in-Chief of Random House at an exciting new job.  The world seemed to pass through that office.  I served coffee and did all the dictaphone typing.

In the fall of 1974 I had moved on to a job I liked even better on most days because I was no longer a typist and a server of coffee but a "research assistant" in the Book Review Department at Newsweek Magazine. Even more of the world flowed through these offices, which was known as "The Back of the Book," with Jack Kroll in charge.  It was during the two and a half years that I was employed by Newsweek that I met the people and made the connections that would lead to my free lance writing career at The Village Voice, a literary agent and a book contract at McGraw Hill for an as yet untitled book on the sexual politics of black women and black men.
At the birthday party for my Dad, and his sister Gloria in September of 1977, at which this picture was taken, I was presumably then engaged in writing the manuscript that would become Black Macho and The Myth of the Superwoman in 1979.  The contract money had already run out and I had just begun to work full time in the position of Lecturer in the Journalism Program at New York University.  I was living at Washington Square Village, NYU housing.  I had moved from 345 early in the summer of 1976 upon the occasion of the massively successful Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts, which was given by a committee composed of Margo Jefferson, Pat Jones, Monica Freeman and myself at the Women's Interarts Center on the Westside.
See more of these pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mjsoulpictures/sets/

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.