6/12/2023 0 Comments Faith ringgold tar beach 1988“I said to him,” Ringgold continued, “ ‘You know something? I think what she’s saying is-it’s the 1960s, all hell is breaking loose all over, and you’re painting flowers and leaves. That’s interesting!”ĭriving back to Harlem, she and Birdie talked about what had happened. “What is she talking about? I was taught that!” Ringgold remembered thinking. The dealer studied the work, the artist told me, then said to her, “You”-pause-“can’t”-pause-“do that.” Ringgold showed White her paintings-still lifes and landscapes in what she called “French” colors, which were very much in line with the gallery’s focus. “We used to bring in the actual art because I didn’t want to hear anything about, ‘Yeah, but I can’t see it. “We never showed books or slides,” Ringgold told me one morning in her studio at her home in Englewood, New Jersey. The artist’s second husband, Burdette Ringgold (everyone calls him Birdie), went along too, carrying her paintings, as he always did. Nevertheless, as Ringgold tells it in her memoirs, We Flew over the Bridge (1995), she was unrelenting in her search, and one day she had a meeting with Ruth White, who ran a gallery in Manhattan on 57th Street. To say that it was difficult for black artists to find gallery representation at that time would be a gross understatement. In 1963, Faith Ringgold was 32, the mother of two daughters, and on the hunt for a gallery to show her work.
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