FAITH RINGGOLD

I had this idea that I wanted to do this mixture of visions of African American women and visions of African American men. And call it 'The Men' and call it 'The Women' and show different faces of these two people.

I just feel like I'm the luckiest person in the world being able to do what I love and be able to do it all day every day if I like, you know, I mean it's great, I love it.

I had something I was trying to say and sometimes the message is an easy transmission and sometimes it's a difficult one but I love the power of saying it so I'm gonna do it whether it's hard or easy.

I guess I had fun doing it but it has hard memories for me.

Because the mask is your face, the face is a mask, so I'm thinking of the face as a mask because of the way I see faces is coming from an African vision of the mask which is the thing that we carry around with us, it is our presentation, it's our front, it's our face.

I think that has been a benefit to me because I think most people understand quilts and not a lot of people understand paintings. But yet they're looking at one.

I'm not so presumptuous to feel that they're gonna get it right away, get exactly what I have in mind. I hope that they'll enjoy looking at it at any rate, whatever it is. And that's why I started writing stories on my work.

There were a lot of stop signs in my life... People telling you what to do, when to do it, and so on.

I can recall that nobody ever went out the door that wasn't dressed nicely, even though it was the Depression. I particularly remember on Sunday, the day we all went to church, if you didn't have it together, you kind of stayed in the house.

Art is a form of experience of the person, the place, the history of the people, and as black people, we are different. We hail from Africa to America, so the culture is mixed, from the African to the American. We can't drop that. It's reflected in the music, the dance, the poetry, and the art.

What has not changed is people are still doing whatever they think they can get away with. I think there's still a lot of advancement for people, generally speaking, to learn to let other people live in the world with freedom.

Black women have never embraced feminism. They didn't embrace it in the '50s and '60s; they're not embracing it now. That's not new. I think it's a tendency among women in general not to be supportive of each other.

The reason why I began making quilts is because I wrote my autobiography in 1980 and couldn't get it published because I wanted to tell my story, and my story didn't appear to be appropriate for African-American women.

There were people who would complain about their jobs, and my mother would walk away from that job. I liked that a lot about her. She was a very, very creative woman, and eventually, she stopped working outside the house, and she just had her own customers whom she made clothes for.

Different people were complaining, and I remember saying, 'Why don't we just demonstrate?' The Whitney was the first.

Paintings, people really don't understand... They don't really get paintings. Quilts they do understand because everybody has a quilt in their house.

Every time people struggle, they survive, they do better, and then they forget, and they end up back where they started from.

I think I had struck on a combination of imagery and politics that worked.

Here I come with these images of black and white people, and a lot of people got angry at me.

I think all children love art, but not all get the opportunity to do it.

It is so sad that it takes so long for people to understand what needs to happen in order to be free.

Children are so talented. Little children, until about the age of 10 or 11, are just little artists. They need to be given the time and the space and the materials to do their work. That's all they need.

I have always wanted to tell my story - or, more to the point, my side of the story.

I don't think you can create art out of anger; it has to come out of some form of understanding. You have to feel good about who you are and that you could do something to change things.

I was functioning in a time when people were struggling, and they knew they had to struggle, and I was a part of that struggle. It wasn't just women.