Flower for Faith
Lately, my body has been still & my mind has been feverishly spinning (restless really). I feel that I have all the energy in the world that I desire to pour into stitching an assemblage of this life. Yet, a certain level of patience is also being demanded from me. I am also being called to emphasize an element of play as I stitch this life together.
On Friday, April 12th, 2024 we lost one of our great artists (one of the last with a backbone) & person Faith Ringgold. In my early life, there are a few distinct moments that I remember being pulled to participate in the expressive arts of others. I have a memory of the moment language enveloped me & I became a writer. There was also a moment where the visual arts were cracked open like a geode & I saw the gems of who I was reflected back to me. This latter moment involved the time I learned about African American face jugs & Faith Ringgold’s story quilts in the third grade.
I remember my art teacher introducing her quilts to the class. I remember how amazed I was at the art she stitched to craft a story. I remember going to the library to check out her children’s books. I remember, perhaps for the first time in that class, seeing an art form that was familiar to me. I remember thinking my life is art: my grandmother’s life is art, my aunt’s life is art, & the people I used to imagine running through the deep Southern woods on the way to the country whose names I didn’t know…their life too was art. I remember thinking I, a young Black Southern girl, was art. Once that feeling becomes embodied, it empowers one to move through the world differently.
I could gather love, gather collards, gather experiences, gather words, gather herbs, gather whatever my hands pulled to stitch a bountiful life. I could stitch an assemblage by participating in the ancient ritual of gathering & that is life. They would label this way of life (this art form) vernacular, folk, and craft with the same slanted look they gazed upon the region of the United States I call home. They didn’t know these gathering folk sustained themselves through the overcoming of functional fixedness. The gathering folk took what some saw as low-brow & trash & spun it into gold. This art, & Black Folk, have fairytale-like ways of thriving in a world gerrymandered with suffering.
And so currently, I’m spinning & spinning—round & round. But isn’t this also part of the ways ancient hands pulled single threads to stitch quilts of embodied wisdom? I’m spinning & so did my ancestors & so did Faith & Bisa Butler is spinning & Harriet Powers spun & Tina Williams Brewer is spinning & the quilters of Gee’s Bend are spinning &—
time is continuously spinning & weaving us gathering folk together. Thread by thread we charge our hands with restlessness infused in the maps in our palms. We spin & the only time time seem to get still is when our mapped palms touch.
Somebody touched me with a spinning & thread & I can still feel it lifting me h i g h into the s k y.
“You can’t sit around waiting for somebody else to tell you who you are. You need to write it, & paint it, & do it. That’s where the art comes from.”
Here are flowers for Faith: who is still spinning & lifting me eternally higher ✨
“This quilt was created as an homage to the most famous quilt artist in the world, Ms. Faith Ringgold on the occasion of her honorary degree from her alma mater City College. In 2011 I was chosen by Dr. Myrah Greene to create a quilt in honor of Faith along with other hand picked artists. My quilt is how I imagine a character in one of her most famous books, Tar Beach, would look . The name of the little girl in the story is Cassie Louise Lightfoot , and she imagines that she can fly over the tops of the buildings in New York City. Faith painted Cassie in a yellow dress, so I made my interpretation of Cassie wearing a yellow flour sack dress made from the cast off cotton sacks depression era women and children used for clothing. In Cassie’s hair are bright ribbons because my own grandmother always insisted on ribbons in our hair, not barrettes. Cassie hold a big bouquet because she is presenting it to Faith. This is my way of saying thank you for leading the way. Every African American woman artist in this country, along with every art quilter owes Ms. Faith Ringgold an incredible debt because she made it possible just by being herself , for us to be taken seriously.” — Bisa Butler via Artsy
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