Reviews

We Flew over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold by Faith Ringgold

gaybf's review against another edition

4.75

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• (On Tar Beach; In the '30s in Harlem, Faith's childhood) On hot summer evenings, we would go up to the tar-covered roof of the building, which was known as "Tar Beach." We would take blankets, a jug of lemonade, some sandwiches, and a watermelon. While the adults would play cards or talk, we kids got a chance to stay up late, snack, and look at the stars until we fell asleep. In the daytime it was cooler on the fire escapes, and we would pad them with blankets, and sip lemonade while we caught the sun. This was our "terrace." When we looked around, we saw the whole neighborhood perched on their fire escapes. 
• (first marriage, 1950) I had a studio now in the back room that Earl and I used to share when we were first married. In the evenings when the children were sleeping, I devoted as much time as I could to my art. One of the first paintings I did was of Barbara at about two months old. I was trying to find my own images and learn to paint them since they had not taught me how to do this in my art class.
• (Barbara's second marriage, in the '60s, to Burdette; 1962 12 yrs after 1950) "How long do you think we would have lasted if we had lived together instead of getting married?" I asked Birdie recently.
  He responded, smiling wryly, "Not past the first year, if that."
  "Why didn't you want to marry me?" I asked him. 
  "I didn't want the responsibility," he admitted. 
  "And then later you did?" I asked. 
  "No, I wanted you," Birdie replied. 
• in 1972 Willi Posey, R's mom, began to collaborate with her by making the tankas for her Slave Rape Series and the costumes for the Family of Woman Mask Series. "What was so wonderful about collaborating with her was her ingenious solutions to design problems. For example, I was not sure how the tankas should look for the Slave Rape Series. The Tibetan tankas I had shown Mother were cut out of a single piece of cloth and were not patched. When she was a little girl growing up in Florida, Mother had learned quilt-making in the free hand piecing technique her grandmother, Betsy Bingham, had taught her. The result was that Mother's tankas were an amazing original blend: a tanka that was Tibetan and African inspired, yet drew heavily from the African-American women's pieced quilting tradition. 
• (on her mother's death in 1981) Not a day passes that I don't wish I could tell my mother about all the many wonderful things that have happened to me since she died: a twenty-year retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem; a twenty-five-year retrospective that traveled to thirteen museums; a senior professorship at UC San Diego; seven honorary doctorates including one from my alma mater, the City College of NY; five children's books that I authored and illustrated; this autobiography; over 100 awards, honors citations and grants, public and private commissions (including 2 30-ft mosaic murals to be installed in NY's 125th Street IRT subway in 1995); an increasingly happy marriage; two wonderful daughters; three beautiful grandchildren; and many, many new friends.
• (The French Collection) In 1990 I went to Paris and la Napoule in the South of France to create the most ambitious of all my tributes to Mother -- The French Collection, a twelve-part, painted story-quilt series. After our initial trip to Europe in 1961, Mother had returned several times to Europe to visit the couturiers in Paris and Rome. (I would write on her behalf to request invitations to see the private showings at the salons and Mother would come home bursting with ideas for her next season's collections.) She kept a scrapbook of her invitations and sketches of the designs she saw. Mother was a good traveler and going to Europe in the '60s and to Africa in the '70s not only brought her a rich reservoir of fashion ideas,  but also many new friends and associates. If only she had been able to go to Europe in the '20s when she was young--like Willia Marie Simone, heroine of the French Collection -- who knows what Mother could have done. 
        Willa Marie Simone is a woman of courage, originality, and creativity but, unlike Mother, WIlla Marie was able to do things that no African-American woman artist had ever been able to do in Paris or America. In this sense, Willa Marie is my alter ego. For her character I had to rewrite history using Mother's beloved Paris as the setting. 
  In the French Collection Series I seized the opportunity to paint in the manner of Van Gogh, Matisse, Monet, and Picasso, as I had tried to do when I was a student. But now I had a story to tell about a young Black woman who went to Paris at age sixteen to become an artist and never to return to America. As the story goes, WMS becomes a successful artist and makes a name for herself in the modern art movement and exchanges ideas with the great artists of her time. 
  "If indeed my mother were to reappear and I could talk to her, what would she say about my story of Willa Marie? She always had the answers for me before, so it is reasonable to expect that in death she would be even more perfect than in life." 
• her meeting w James Porter at her 1968 show of "American People"; he bought "Bridesmaid of Martha's Vineyard" which she intended to be about unmarried Black women but renamed it Bride. 
• (BlackLight series) I was interested in Ad Reinhardt and Josef Albers since they, too, had created black paintings. Reinhardt's paintings are hard to see; a guard at the Museum of Modern Art once told me that often people get frustrated looking at them because the canvases appear to have no images at all. Only after intense concentration do Reinhardt's images become visible. People got angry about his style of painting. Were they angry because it was black? Wasn't Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man' black? And how much of the hatred directed at black people had to do with their lack of high visibility? Is Black racism just another term for low "color" visibility?
          The way we see color is influenced by the colors that surround us. Our own color, for instance, is indelibly etched in our mind and, unless someone tells us otherwise, it influences our overall sense of color. As an artist and woman of color, I had become particularly interested in this idea. I had noticed that Black artists tended to use a darker palette. White and light colors are used sparingly and relegated to contrasting color in African-American, South African, and East African art--and used as a "mood" color in African supernatural and death masks. In Western art, however, white and light influence the entire palette, thereby creating a predominance of white, pastel colors, and light-and-shade, or chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro and light, employed to suggest space and form, were first seen in Italian painter Masaccio's 'Expulsion from the Garden of Eden,' which is a classic "beginning" moment in European Renaissance art history. As a young art student, I tried feverishly to paint Black portraits using light and shade. I became frustrated because dark-skinned images painted this way lose their luminosity and therefore look better painted in flat color. The South, West, and East Africans knew this and created their paintings accordingly. 
• In the fall of 1970 Poppy Johnson and Lucy Lippard formed an ad hoc women's group to protest the small percentage of women in all past Whitney Annuals. I was asked to join and agreed. I was excited about the prospect of Black women artists being included in the Whitney Annual. Our goal for the 1970 Annual was fifty percent women: Michele's equality percentage for women in the art world had caught on. 
  The corridors and the galleries of the Whitney Museum became the focus of our attention. We went there often to deposit eggs. Unsuspecting male curatorial staff would pick up the eggs and experience the shock of having raw eggs slide down the pants of their fine tailor-made suits. I made hard-boiled eggs, painted them black, and wrote "50 percent" on them in red paint. I didn't want to waste food. They could eat my black eggs. Sanitary napkins followed. These upset the female staff as well as the men. Generally, everywhere the staff went they found loud and clear messages that women artists were on the Whitney's "case." 
• "Is there a women's art, and if so, what is it?" was the constant question posed to us. The concept of making female images as opposed to male, and black images as opposed to white or abstract, was the crux of the issue. "Who needs all this talk about black art and women's art?" some artists would say. "I'm just an artist who happens to be black or a women." It was a real challenge to try to define oneself and one's art outside the narrow parameters of the mainstream art world. But we were doing this stuff and it felt good. 
• (POLITICAL ART/Attica poster) On November 13, 1970, I was arrested along with two white male artists, Jean Toche and Jon Hendricks. We were charged with desecrating the flag and arrested fir being members of the People's Flag Show Committee, the ad hoc group of over two hundred artists who had organized the show. Our arrest was on a Friday night and it was raining slightly. We usually closed the church and went home at 8 PM. Michele was with me that night, but Barbara was at home waiting for us to have dinner. Birdie and I were separated again since the summer. We had one of those arguments that men have when they want to move out. I was too busy with all my activities to finish the arguments with him, and I kept forgetting what they were about. 
       ... An arrest of my daughter was not something, however, I could tolerate. Let them take me instead. "She's not a member of anything, but I am," 
  May 24 1971 they were found guilty and sentenced to one month jail or hundred dollar fine; they paid the fine. 
• (Attica poster) Today, posters are included in many museums and private art collections. But at this time the poster was a political quasi-art form that many artists and activsts used solely to communicate important messages to the masses; it soon became a cheap or giveaway form of art. I began making posters in 1970. I did my first poster project, dated July 1970, for the Committee to Defend the Panthers, a radical-chic New York group whose purpose was to raise money for the Panthers' legal defense. I remember being rather shocked that rich white people like Leonard Bernstein would associate themselves with such controversial cause. The day I took them the poster, their office had been fire-bombed and there was water everywhere. They seemed paranoid that day and rightly so. They rejected the poster; perhaps because they had just been bombed, or maybe not. My poster had a central image of a red-eyed, black-faced, snarling panther-looking man, flanked on both sides by profiles of two raging white panther heads. The text read "Committee to Defend the Panthers, Free all political prisoners, All Power to the People" with the committee's address and phone number: 11 East 13th Street NYC, 243 2260. How was I to know the committee was operating undercover, especially since they had originally tried to talk me into making the high Panther rhetoric -- "Off the Pigs" and "Kill Whitey"--the central theme of my poster. This is the only poster I've ever done that was never reproduced. 
       "The People's Flag Show" was my next poster. I did it in November of 1970 and it was not only reproduced but sold at the opening for one or two dollars; later if became one of the "people's" exhibits in our trial. This poster was an image of the American flag. On the stars was an announcement of the show, and on the stripes was a statement by Michele, which said in essence that the American flag belonged to the American people to do with it as they saw fit. I followed this in 1971 with two posters I made for Angela Davis-- Angela Free Women Free Angel' and 'America free Angela free America.' 
  ... 'The United States of Attica' was my most widely distributed poster of the 1970s (about two thousand were made and I sold them for a dollar or so each), and I dedicated it to the men who died in 1971 at Attica prison in Upper New York State demonstrating against the deplorable conditions of the prison system. This red-black-and green poster depicts a map of the United States. Within each state I recorded the dates and other details of infamous acts of violence that occurred there, such as race riots, witch hunts, presidential assassinations, lynchings, and Native wars. Around the periphery of the map I included a statistical history of the dead, wounded, and missing in American wars--starting with the 1776 Revolutionary War through to the Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodian wars, which by 1971 had resulted in an estimated 45,564 dead. The most infamous of all statistics recorded here are from the Indian Wars where the dead numbered in the millions, leaving a current Native American population of approximately 900,000; and the Middle Passage, in which an estimated 4,000,000 African slaves died en route to the U.S. New acts of violence were increasing at such alarming rate that I had no space to include all of them. And so, realizing I would not be able to revise annually, I wrote an appeal for people to add their own updated information as they saw fit. There was an interesting time in the mid-seventies when this particular poster fell into disfavor; political apathy was nationally on the increase, and students felt the poster's information was too depressing. They didn't want to be reminded of how many American Indians, Black slaves, and others had died in the making of this country. I gave the poster away then. Now it is in short supply, and I only release it for benefits, exhibitions, or occasionally for gifts. 
• (her mother visiting the women's prison where she painted "For the Women's House," 1971) They were visibly shaken by the appeal of a young man they saw. He'd had a sex change operation and desperately needed his hormone medicine or his male sex characteristics would reappear. He appealed to Mother's renegade tour group to contact his doctor and make him aware of his condition--and they did. 
• (The Slave Rape series) was a narrative in which I placed myself in the time of my female ancestors, those brave African women who survived the horror of being uprooted and carried off to slavery in America. 
  Mother made the tankas for the Slave Rape Series after I had taken her downtown to a gallery that sold Tibetan tankas. Mother was fascinated. There were several tankas laid out on the floor in the black space of the tiny gallery; before I knew it, mother was back there inspecting the fabric and the workmanship of the tankas for minute details. .... mother made the tankas for all my paintings and they were beautiful, though at the time I was horrified by the asymmetrical liberties she took with the design. Later I realized how skillfully she translated the Tibetan tankas into a unique African-American expression. 'Fear', 'Run', and ' Fight' were large, close-up figures of idealized African women struggling against capture and enslavement. I discovered only too late that having painted these in oil on unstretched canvas made their paint surfaces susceptible to cracking and, therefore, unsuitable for framing in cloth... they are still some of my most prized pieces, primarily because of the work Mother did on the tankas. 
  ...(Faith continued work on the Slave Rape theme) using acrylic paint on unstretched canvas; mother made tankas for them in a style more simple and appropriate to the tiny fleeing figures in pursuit and, in some cases armed with hatches to defend themselves. 
  Many people were confused by the tankas; they called them weavings, banners, textiles, fibers. They didn't seem to realize they were looking at paintings on canvas--there were no wooden frames and no stretchers. I didn't like being accused of doing crafts. Being Black and a woman were enough. Did I need to be further eliminated on the grounds that I was doing crafts instead of "fine art"? 
• In traditional African masked rituals, all of the masks have female features although the wearers are almost always men. Mother knew the people the Family of Woman Series masks commemorated -- powerful women who never had a chance to be all they could be. They were women who lived their lives fully making a lot out of the little they had, and sharing some, too. Among the masks I created were 'Mrs. Curry and Charles,' who lived next door to us on Edgecombe Avenue; 'Aunt Edith and Aunt Bessie,' my mother's older sisters; and our own family portrait, 'Mrs. Jones, Andrew, Barbara and Faith.' 
• The Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Nigeria took place in January of 1977. I went over with two hundred and fifty Black American artists, dancers, musicians, and writers (selected by a committee of Black curators) to celebrate our culture. We stayed in Festac Village, a government project erected for the festival in a suburb fifteen miles from Lagos. (After the festival the village was to be used as a model housing plan for the Nigerians). The site accommodated the festival participants from fifty-eight nations representing Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, South America, and North America. These nations sent their most renowned Black artists as their delegates. Can you imagine a better Black cultural explosion? None of us will ever forget it. 
• Even when we were together, Birdie had always kept a tiny place with access to the roof so he could raise his birds. As a kid, he raised Flights (pigeons) on the roof. He no longer raised Flights, but he did own several prize-winning homing pigeons and he ran them on weekends in races from Washington, D.C. to New York City.
• The Woman on a Pedestal Series were my first freestanding sculptures. Birdie had said he always placed me on a pedestal. Was that really part of our problem? In any case, I think pedestals are for fragile, inanimate objects that are nice to look at and own but are otherwise useless. They are placed on pedestals to prevent them from being lost, damaged, or broken. Some people may see women like that, but I don't see myself that way and I told Birdie so. 
• 'The Flag is Bleeding, 'U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Advent of Black Power', and 'Die' --the last works in the American People Series-- were inspired by the mood and events of this year. It was in 1967 that for the firt time I heard the chant "Black Power every hour, Black Power every hour..." I could hear it in my classroom like background music while the children painted. It came to mind that this was more than a chant--it could mean a new way of life for Black people in America. But what about me as a Black woman? If Black people got power, would that include me? Would I, too, have power? Would I be able to stand toe-to-toe with my contemporaries and work out the problems of our time? Would my accomplishments be recognized and rewarded in kind? Or would I still be in the kitchen making coffee and serving up the leftovers? 
• In January 1973 Ringgold resigned from Brandeis and left teaching in public schools; she was being asked to lecture at feminist art conferences all over the country; she was developing an audience for her art. She decided to become an artist full time. In her classes she had included Elizabeth Catlett, Meta Warrick Fuller, Lois Mailou Jones, Augusta Savage, Laura Wheeler Waring, Camille Billops, Emma Amos, and Barbara Chase Riboud; men she included were Robert Duncanson, Horace Pippin, William H Johnson, Sargeant Johnson, Archibald Motley, Aaron Douglas, Romare Bearden, and Jacob Lawrence. 
• In August 1982 Faith's sister Barbara died less than a year after her mother of an alcohol addiction. She became closer to Michele who began joining her in performance. 
• (On Story Quilts) Faith recalls a Black woman who believed the Slave Rape Story Quilt was autobiographical. "I wondered if she thought I was CeCe, the main character in 'The Bitter Nest' performance, but I didn't dare ask. So maybe I should tell you right here and now that my stories are fantasized adaptations of real life--based on issues and historical events in the lives of people. My stories may include actual real-life experiences that I have had--that I know about or can imagine happening to me or to other people--but they are almost always also imaginary. None of them can be read literally. 
• (^) "Most of my stories are about women and all of my narrators are female. These narrators are fashioned after the women I heard tell stories as I sat quietly, so as not to be sent off to bed, listening intently to the often tragic details of the lives of family members and friends told in that way that Black women had in my childhood of expressing themselves. On occasion I have also made a man the center of a story quilt, but his story can only unfold as I begin to hear a woman telling it. 
• (Tar Beach) Since 1987 I had tried to get my story quilts published but was constantly told, "Oh, but they are art books and there is no market for them." --it wasn't until Tar Beach that she found a way to publish them. ... "Tat Beach is a story of an eight-year-old girl named Cassie whose family takes her up to the roof ("Tar Beach") on hot summer nights. Cassie dreams of a steady good job for her father, who is a construction worker but was denied a union card because of racism. Cassie also dreams her mother could sleep late (just like Mrs. Honey, their next door neighbor) and not cry all day when her husband goes looking for work and then doesn't come home. "
  With the Washington Bridge in the background she dreams she can fly over the buildings and claim them as her own. She flies over the Union building and gives it to her father. She flies over the ice cream factory so that she and BeBe her brother can have some every night. At the end she tells BeBe: "Anyone can fly, all you have to do is have somewhere to go that you can't get to any other way and the next thing you know you're flying among the stars." 
  Faith says: These children's books seek to explain to children some of the hard facts of slavery and racial prejudice, issues that are difficult but crucial to their education. But my books are even more about children having dreams, and instilling in them a belief that they can change things. When Cassie believes, she can fly, it is not because she wants to go to Florida to see her grandma, but rather because she envisions a better life for her family. Already at eight years old she wiely recognizes that all good things can start with a dream. So flying is about achieving a seemingly impossible goal with no more guarantee of success than an avowed committment to do it. 
• (Attica poster) Art Without Walls, another group I founded in 1972, was a volunteer group of about twelve artists (Black and white, male and female, including students from Brandeis High School and Wagner College where I was then teaching) who went every Sunday to the Women's House of Detention on Rikers Island to do art and discussion workshops. Mother, Michele, and I had initially conducted discussions with the women about their plants for staying out of jail. However, our participation in Art without Walls was short-lived; the prison officials preferred workshops like yoga, dance, and face-painting to our discussion groups. 
• FInally, I received a letter from a museum administrator in which he wrote: "If you are not already aware, you should know that 'Tar Beach' is one of the most requested objects from our collection for loan to other institutions." But still, between you and me, I don't know what it would take to have this totally Eurocentric male-dominated Guggenheim Museum exhibit a painted story quilt by an African-American woman. So I don't hold my breath, but it was the innocence of children that initially broached the subject. And if 'Tar Beach' ever hangs on the walls of the Guggenheim, it will be due to the children. 
• I don't want the story of my life to be about racism, though it has played a major role. I want my story to be about attainment, love of family, art, helping others, courage, values, dreams coming true. Although my struggle to overcome may seem like a hard life, it is not as hard as it seems--in fact, struggle is as natural to me as walking. I embrace it, but I could also learn to live without it. 

mayapapayaya's review against another edition

emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

5.0

lep42's review

4.0

This book reminded me how much I enjoy artist's biographys and focused art histories. My only quibble was that it was organized both thematically and chronology, so it was slightly repetitive and hard to follow in places. My favorite chapters dealt with the questions "Is there a Black Art?" and "Is there a Woman's Art?"