Faith Ringgold, Dancing at the Louvre

We're upstairs in the Gund, the museum on the campus of Kenyon College, looking at one of their most celebrated works, Faith Ringgold's Dancing at the Louvre, the first quilt in a series of 12 that she calls story quilts, a type of art that she literally invented. She started making quilts in the 1980s alongside her mother, who was a fashion designer. And she began to paint on these quilts and inscribe them with text. This tells the story of a fictional woman who is loosely based on Faith Ringgold and on her mother living in Paris in the 1920s. Faith Ringgold has constructed a fictional space within the Louvre, uniting three works by Leonardo da Vinci. When we think of art as elevated, even elitist, this is the world that we imagine. And yet, what Faith Ringgold has done is paint this scene on a quilt and place a Black family before these paintings, but with their backs towards the paintings and being incredibly playful. The author of the text, which is posed as a letter to her Aunt Melissa, is visiting the Louvre with her childhood friend Marcia. They're visiting the Louvre with Marcia's three children to see the Mona Lisa, but their joy and their dancing, as she puts it, becomes the show. Faith Ringgold is playing on the expected norms of a fine art museum, disrupting the quiet and The ivory tower of it all. The sanctity. The sanctity. All three girls and the two adults have dressed up for this trip to the museum. The adults are wearing heels, the girls are wearing Mary Janes, all of them have bows in their hair, they're wearing dresses that are tied at the waist with a bow. So this comes back to the idea of a museum as a sacred space and a space in which one is meant to be quiet, perhaps be seen and not heard. This also connects to Faith Ringgold's ongoing activism in New York, She would protest alongside other figures from the black arts movement, protesting for the inclusion of more black artists in storied spaces, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art. Let's think about what a quilt means in this context. Here we are in an art museum looking at a quilt as if it was a framed painting. This was a radical notion in the 1980s and 1990s. If it was woman's work, traditionally, if it was craft, It was understood to be intellectually less valuable, a lesser form of work. And what Faith Ringgold has done is to raise this type of art into the realm of fine art, to have it taken seriously. So Faith Ringgold is within a legacy of not only women who worked with textiles and quilting, but specifically Black women. Faith Ringgold is using this medium of liberation and expressing just that. Look at the Virgin of the Rocks, for example. Look at the blues and aquas and greens that are almost electric, that are so unlike the original painting and are a kind of free interpretation as this entire image is. And surrounding this, there are two bands of text from the point of view of this fictional character writing to her Aunt Melissa, who is back in Atlanta caring for her own children, who she has left behind as she has gone to Paris. to be an artist. On the top right, there is an oft-referenced piece of this letter where she writes that she resents her friend Marcia telling her that her children belong in France with her instead of being raised by their aunt. Why would the artist include something like that in this image? And I think it speaks to the challenge of being a female artist in the 1960s to the 1970s and the 1980s and the need to devote an enormous amount of time time and attention to one's own work and the Surrounding the composition is this fabric that is so of the era, framing this black story with materials of her culture. And framing the painted interior, in a sense, with the history of quilt making. She is emphasizing the central role of quilting for black culture and black visual art, tearing down the division between craft and art by combining them. Right in the center of the painting is this little girl jumping, her legs folding up slightly, the green of the shadows of her pink dress, her hair in this bow, her arms outstretched. Her eyes closed as an expression of her complete abandonment. The two women, one seems to be almost presenting her to us, but the woman in blue seems to be trying to contain her. But wonderfully, Mona Lisa herself seems to be pleased with the expression of joy and pleasure and play that is so rarely seen in the museum.