Other Posts on the 60s

Camp Craigmeade--links:

http:/mjsoulpictures.blogspot.com/search/label/Camp%20Craigmeade

Aunt Helen who ran the black sleepaway camp Barbara and I attended in the 60s dies at camp.

My Counselor Marion.

Camp Craigmeade in the 60s

New Lincoln School--links:

http://mjsoulpictures.blogspot.com/search/label/New%20Lincoln%20School

New Lincoln in the 60s. Graduation Year 1969.

Michele in Anything Goes at New Lincoln in 1968

40 Year New Lincoln Reunion at the Prison on 110th Street in 1968.

Sonny Rollins--From Harlem in the 60s:

http://mjsoulpictures.blogspot.com/search/label/Sonny%20Rollins

Once in Awhile: Sonny Rollins in Denmark. Link: http://jazzicons.com/vid_rollins.html.

Faith and Sonny Rollins receive honorary doctorates at Rutger's University in 2009.

Sonny Rollins plays for Faith's "Sonny's Quilt" at the Mason Gross School of Art on the occasion of her 50 Year Retrospective.

American People/America Black 1960s links--
 http://www.michelewallace.zenfolio.com

http://michelewallace.zenfolio.com/p101326882

Chronology of the 60s

1961

March 26--NAFAD (National Association of Fashion and Accessory Designers) Fashion Show (Hostesses Barbara Mayo and Mme. Willi Posey) at the Red Shield Building.  Zelda Wynn President. Amsterdam News.

June 1st--Fashion Show of Mme. Willi Posey and her models at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Joppa Chapter OES, Amsterdam News.

July 15th--Michele, Barbara, Faith and Mme. Willi Posey depart via the Paquebot Liberty from New York to Plymouth to Le Harve, Tourist Class.  Travel from Le Harve to Paris to Nice and Monte Carlo (Faith and her mother see the performance of Sammy Davis Jr. with the Monte Carlo Dancing Stars), Florence and Rome.

August--While in Rome we learn that Uncle Andrew has died.  Travel by train from Rome through Switzerland back to Paris where we take a jet back to New York for the funeral, which is handled by Barbara Knight (with Burdette's assistance), Mom's sister via her apartment at 345 West 145th Street.  Andrew is the oldest child and dearly loved by all. 

1962

January 1st--

Faith and Burdette are married at Bethany Lutheran Church. Michele and Barbara serve as flower girls. MJ designs all of the clothing and gives the wedding, with a reception at Aunt Barbara's apartment in 345 West 145th Street with Aunt Edith and Aunt Bessie doing the Southern cooking and Momma T (Earl's mother) doing the West Indian cooking.

Michele and Barbara spend their last summer at Camp Craigmeade. Aunt Helen dies during the summer and the camp never reopens.
In the fall upon Michele's return to Our Savior Lutheran School in the Bronx, she had a racist experience with her 6th grade teacher, Mrs. (McKee) Schwernerman, which involved the Director of the School, the Minister at the Lutheran Church we attended and where Faith and Burdette were married, and Faith who confronted them about it.  The teacher yelled at my mother: "Why Don't You Go To The NAACP!" From this moment, the decision was made that I would be leaving this school in the Fall. 

1963

Medgar Evers Murdered.
Michele and Barbara spend the summer at Martha's Vineyard where Faith will develop the first of her American Series paintings on the lawn at the house where we were staying: Between Friends, For MEmbers Only, The Neighbors, The Civil Rights Triangle, Watching and Waiting.
March on Washington in August led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the SCLC.  Broadcast live on CBS all day. 

In the fall, Michele and Barbara move from 665 Westchester Avenue in the Bronx to 345 West 145th Street in Harlem, and enter New Lincoln School on 110th Street between Lenox Avenue and Fifth Avenue.  Progressive racial school written up in the New York  Times and Ebony Magazine.  Always conceived as such originally in its split from Horace Mann and Columbia University.  Moved into this building precisely because it was poised on the edge of black Harlem in the late 40s. The building now houses a low-security prison.

John F. Kennedy assassinated in Dallas, Texas in November.

1964
Nina Simone came out with "Mississippi Goddamn" to honor the memory of Medgar Evers and the 4 girls killed in the bombing of the Church in Birmingham.  Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come," one of the great anthems of the Civil Rights Movement was issued after his death.  Many great singers would perform it, including both Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding. 

1965

Malcolm X assassinated at the Audobon Ballroom in Harlem in 1965.  Funeral Services held in Harlem with a Parade.

Faith painted her Self Portrait in this year. 

1966

Earl dies of a drug overdose this summer.

Faith, Barbara, Burdette and Michele visit Provincetown, MA with the insurance money Earl left for us. This was our last trip to Provincetown as a family.

1967

Barbara and Michele travel to France, Italy and England with Mme. Willi Posey where they study languages and she visits the Collection shows.

Faith stays at her mother's apartment and paints the three murals of American People at the Spectrum Gallery on 57th Street, which is closed for the summer.

Faith and Burdette separate for a time, although he is still in the picture.  He retreats to an apartment just down the block in 409 Edgecombe Avenue, where he grew up.

Faith's American People exhibition opens in the Fall at the Spectrum Gallery.

 Many of Michele and Barbara's friends from New Lincoln attend the opening on 57th Street--including Danny Allentuck, Stanley Nelson, Sarah Newton, Rosalyn Burks and others.

1968

Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinated.

Robert F. Kennedy assassinated.

Summer--Michele teaches at an arts program held in the High School of Music and Art on the CCNY campus during the summer.

Fall--Michele attends the company class of Arthur Mitchell's Dance Theatre classes, and then Barbara Anne Teer's National Black Theatre.  Forms Black and Puerto Rican Students Alliance at New Lincoln.

Mme. Willi Posey begins making dashikis on commission for the New Breed in Harlem.

October--Faith's father, Andrew Jones, Sr. dies.  Family attends funeral.

1969

June--Michele graduated from New Lincoln.

July--Michele and Barbara travel to the University of Mexico for Summer Study.

August--Michele sees first U.S. moonwalk from Mexico City.  Barbara decides to return to NYC without her after which she is ordered home as well. She spends balance of the summer in The Sisters of the Good Shepard Residence across the street from Beth Israel.

September-- Michele begins school at Howard University.  Loved Howard University so much she decided not to return to Mexico when I had the chance.  Barbara returns to New Lincoln for the 12th Grade. Nonetheless, only had one semester at Howard.  Dad visited and said I should come home.  Said I was partying too much.  

Reading 1968: The Great American Whitewash

Excerpt from Invisibility Blues, "Reading 1968: The Great American Whitewash":

Like everything else human, there are many countercultures, not just one. For instance, today, black youth resist total white hegemonic control over everyday life, often by means considered counter to culture, by drug use and the life of the streets, by their unwillingness to go to school and their inclination to have babies outside wedlock. While such developments are largely the result of an economic and educational stagnation imposed upon then from above, black teenagers respond to this situation partly in the form of an interpretation (from drug use to pregnancy to rap) that is connected by influence and osmosis, to countercultural developments, white, black and brown, in the 50s and the 60s.

As for those decades, I am certain of a deliberate and self-conscious black counterculture because my parents-- my father, who was a jazz musician, my mother, who was an artist, and my stepfather, who was their close friend--were part of it in the 50s. In the 1960s, my father, divorced from my mother and an unsuccessful jazz musician, would die of a heroine overdose. In 1965, my mother, my sister and I took classes at Amiri Baraka's (then Leroi Jones) newly inaugurated School of Black Arts in Harlem. A public high school teacher who was moonlighting as an artist, my mother Faith became a 1960s radical, taking an active role in the black struggle against the United Federation of Teachers over 'decentralization' of the public schools.

In those years, the hardest thing to figure out was culture, how our everyday lives would bear the mark of our political commitment, for it was immediately clear to everyone, once the Civil Rights and Voting Rights bills had been settled, that US capitalist hegemony undermined you most at the level of the everyday. In 1963, Faith began to produce a series of paintings called American People, in which she tried to capture the drama and the underlying structure of the racism that the Civil Rights Movement confronted, as we then viewed it on our television screens, as it affected race relations in the North, as it was written about by James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time (1963), and Amiri Baraka in Dutchman (1964). In 1970, when I became a student at the City College of New York, I was already struck by how many politically active black students were getting involved in heavy drug use, dying at a hospital across the street.

1968 Revisited

'Where is tomorrow's avant-garde in art and entertainment to take on the racial bias of the snowblind, the sexual politics of the frigid, and the class anxieties of the perennially upper crust?' When I asked this question a few months ago, I was trying to make light of something that is not light at all. As ridiculous as it may seem, a white cultural avant-garde, here and abroad, has always believed it possible to make an oppositional art without fundamentally challenging hegemonic notions of race, sexuality and even class.

Of course, when I was a kid, we didn't call it 'white cultural hegemony'. We called it the 'Great American Whitewash'. I had the great good fortune to be raised in a family of artists (my stepfather was not an artist but worked at General Motors to finance our creativity) in which resistance to the old truism, 'If you're white, you're all right; if you're brown stick around; and if you're black, stay back', was viewed not only as a paramount to making art, but basic to one's psychological survival. I still find it astonishing when white people consistently conceptualize resistance in ways that minimize the importance of race, or the vital contribution black artists and intellectuals have made to the discussion of that issue.

But I was first struck by the true dimensions of that problem in 1970, when Faith and I attened a guerilla art action protest against Art Strike, which was itself a protest against 'racism, war and repression'. A group of famous white male artists led by Robert Morris decided to withdraw their work from the Venice Biennale, a prestigious international exhibition, in order to protest US bombing of Cambodia and the murder of college students at Kent, Jackson and and Augusta. Although the protest was supposed to be against 'Racism, War, and Repression' (sexism was not yet on their agenda), Art Strike then expected to mount a counter-Biennale in New York without altering the all-white male composition of the show. This seems to be the key to understanding the intrinsic limits of Western cultural avant-gardism: while it can no longer deny its own white male supremacist presuppositions it canot be rid of them either.

In the first years of our feminism, working through an organization that we founded called Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL), Faith and others succeeded in opening this exhibition to women and people of color. WSABAL was also influential in the subsequent development of Ad Hoc Women Artists, led by Lucy Lippard. This group repeated WSABAL's 50 per cent women demand in their protest against the Whitney Biennial, which was in the habit of including white male artists almost exclusively. Specifically because of Faith's research and support of Ad Hoc, black women artists Barbara Chase Riboud and Bettye Saar were included in the next Whitney Biennial.

Of course, Faith's activism against the museums had not begun in 1970. It really began in 1968 the year of Martin Luther King's assassination, when every black artist and cultural worker in the country was galvanized into action. Only sixteen years old at the time, I accompanied Faith to the first demonstration of black artists against the Whitney Museum and then to a free-for-all (Art Workers' Coalition) demonstrations against the Museum of Modern art. The museums wee reluctant to call in the police at that point. yet, since the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, and the riots, it was no longer tolerable simply to 'picket' in an orderly fashion. These demonstrations were increasingly unpredictable, full of street theatre and creative mayhem, very countercultural in the Wallerstein/Dionsyiac sense.

In one case, I can remember museum adminstrators and security guards standing helplessly by as Faith led a walking tour through MoMA's first floor galleries during which she lectured on the influence of African art and the art of the African Diaspora on the so-called modern art displayed there. The manner in which academic and critical expertise and the museum's curatorial staff conspired to render the importance of that influence either invisible, trivial, or merely instrumental shaped her remarks. When we finally came to a room in which the works of a black artist were displayed-- perhaps two or three gouaches from Jacob Lawrence's 1930s 'Black Migration Series' -- Faith designated it the location for the Martin Luther King Wing, which was then the principal demand of the Art Workers' Coalition demonstrations at MoMA. This wing was supposed to serve as an exhibition space that would revolve around a cultural education center would lead to the canonization of some black artists and the hiring of a few nonwhite curators, but its main intention was to promote an increase in the number of young people of color who would be drawn to careers in art and art education, to foster a more meaningful relationship to museums and 'high culture' for the throngs of nonwhite public school children who were obliged to visit the museums every year.

For many, the Civil Rights Movement was their first exposure to the power of Rainbow Coalitions. My first experience came during those years of involvement with the Art Workers' Coalition. But the lessons were hard one. Ultimately, there would be no Martin Luther King Wing, no cultural center, only retrospective exhibitions for black artists Romare Bearden and Richard Hunt, which made them (no doubt because they were men) even more famous than Barbara Chase Riboud and Bettye Saar.

The resulting tokenism of a few museums shows for a few black artists did not really change the embedded elitism of the art world. Visual art is still perceived by many as the exclusive entertainment of the rich, as though the rest of us didn't need something to look at. At the same time, the important thing seemed to be that my mother was an activist whose work as an artist was consistent with her politics, although I pointedly failed to mention any such thing in my own recollection of the 1960s in Black Macho. This was perhaps my greatest and most unfortunate oversight, since her politics were my politics in the 1960s and for much of the 1970s. If you are lucky enough to have a mother who has a forcefully autonomous political vision, it will be a while before you can be expected to come up with any idea of your own. Of course, I didn't realize this when I wrote Black Macho at the age of twenty-six. Moreover, it is not the style in commercial publishing to give credit where credit is due. Particularly when the credit is due to your mother who is just as black as you are!

Now, however, as recollections of the 190s mount up-- among others, Todd Gitlin's The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, James Miller's Democracy in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago, David Caute's The Years of the Barricades: A Journey Through 1968, Sara Evans' Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left, George Katsiaficas' The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 and Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 by Alice Echols-- we are again facing the Great American Whitewash. Not only has the breadth of the Afro-American cultural presence and contribution almost ceased to exist, but also black, Latino, Asian, feminist and gay 'minorities' have become 'minor' again, as though the revisions of the 60s and the 70s in the way we conceptualize 'history' had never happened.

This is so despite institutions like the Studio Museum in Harlem, which mounted a 1960s show in 1985 called Tradition and Conflict: Images of a Turbulent Decade, 1963-1973' that included endless examples of politically engaged art by women and blacks in the 1960s. Besides Faith, the show included black artists who have long done political work like Bettye Saar, Charles White, Louis Mailou Jones, Benny Andrews, Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Viviane Brown, Camille Billops, Dana Chandler, and David Hammons, together with white political artists like May Stevens, Leon Golub, and Nancy Spiro. There were also black artists whose work tends to be less political in explicit content, but whose use of abstract form, design and medium chalenges the conventions of Western art, the elitism of its hook-up with US capitalism, forging a link with African and other non-European visual traditions: such artists were Joe Overstreet (whose more political 'New Aunt Jemima' was included), Daniel LaRue Johnson, Vincent Smith, Barbara Chase Riboud, Howardina Pindell, Malcolm Bailey and Mel Edwards.

The catalogue, a landmark publication still on sale at the Studio Museum in Harlem, includes essays by Vincent Smith, Lucy Lippard and Mary Schmidt-Campbell. Schmidt-Campbell remarks upon the repeated use of images of the US flag and of Aunt Jemima in the art of Afro-American artists of the 1960s. By that time, Faith had used images of the flag in 'God Bless America' and the large mural, 'The Flag is Bleeding' which were part of 'The American People' series. She had used the flag again in her 'America Black' series in a painting called 'Die Nigger Flag for the Moon', which was a parody of the flag that US astronauts planted on the moon in 1969.

In 1971, at the Judson Memorial Church in New York, we helped to organize, along with John Hendricks and Jon Tosh of Guerilla Art Action, a flag exhibition to protest the Federal law against 'desecrating the flag'. Faith was arrested as one of the Judson Three for violating the law. Minimal artist Carl Andre taped a strip of flag stamps across the floor for people to walk on. Yvonne Rainier's troupe tied flags around their necks and danced naked without music. There were these and other wonderful gestures of white avant-garde humor, but what do you suppose would have happened if a black artist had taped a strip of flag had stripped their clothes off and danced nude with the American flag draped around their necks? Would they have been as readily recorded and applauded? No more than the many artists of color who participated in this exhibition were recorded and applauded. I think the reason for this is racism, knee-jerk, know-nothing, nativist racism among the avant-garde left, the counterculture, and among those who have hitherto written about them (1988).

Soul Pictures

This is a photo of my sister and I with my grandmother Mme. Willi Posey at a fashion show in 1960. Standing in the background in sunglasses is my Mom Faith Ringgold, then Faith Wallace. She had completed her Master's Degree in Art Education at CCNY (1959) and we would soon embark upon our trip together to the museums of Europe to help her figure out what kind of artist she wanted to be. In the course of the 60s, she would remarry (Burdette Ringgold) and develop her characteristic style of painting and distinguish herself as one of the important African American artists of the latter half of the 20th century. Her work was forged in the struggles of the 60s. Our adolescence unfolded in the same context. It was a tight fit.

The current blog is an outgrowth of Soul Pictures: Black Feminist Generations. There's lots more to read there. Meanwhile more will follow specifically about the 60s in a few weeks once I get settled.

Thinking About the 60s

This blog on the 60s forms yet another chapter of my work for Soul Pictures: Black Feminist Generations.

All along it has been like riding a roller coaster just trying to remain focused on understanding the development of the past at the same time I am dealing with the day-to-day of the present non-stop. Our world has become a distracting place in which it is extremely difficult, regardless of your lifestyle, to turn your back on the world and the people around you to focus entirely upon any task.

I am on sabbatical now and the standard I have for myself is high. At first I told myself that I would stay very still and not go anywhere, just dig deep into my source materials, my scans of photographs and slides and completely engage myself in the minutiae of this project, cataloguing Faith and Momma Jones photography and documents collection, at the same time constructing a series of narratives forming the new book Soul Pictures: Black Feminist Generations.

But then the opportunity presented itself to move to a little house across the street where I will have the seclusion and an ideal environment for my work. At the same time, the archival materials I am using remain close at hand. This is a big and complicated step for me. I feel as though I am leaving home for the first time all over again, even though I am 57. I have become very attached to my parents, very attached to our way of life, our comforts and rituals.

Now I will be starting up all over again and I am out of practice in maintaining a household but I trust I will get back into it. My style when I am living on my own is to be as laid back as possible without falling over. I keep a clean, well-organized environment and in the past several years since I broke up with my ex-husband I have learned a lot about what one needs to have to live a comfortable life and all the things one can easily and happily do with out.

I will be in a beautiful and simple environment, surrounded by rustic beauty and quiet. I relish the opportunity to really process the materials I have accumulated through the writings and posts on my blogs.

This blog in particular has come about in order to focus on the organization of the materials related to the 60s. I've come to realize in simply having set myself this task that the 60s were not such a great time for me. It was largely a time of powerlessness and confusing, impatience with being young and knowing nothing and yet surrounded by obviously earth shattering changes in politics and culture. In 1960, I was 8 years old. I was living with my Mom in an apartment in the Bronx in St. Marys Mitchell Lama Housing, a type of "middle class" housing that was ideal for my mother's station in life as a high school teacher with two children. We had moved from Edgecombe Avenue with my grandmother in 1959.

We only lived in the Bronx for about 4 years during which Faith and Burdette were married in 1962. In 1959, Faith finished her Master's Degree in Art Education. In 1961, Faith, Momma Jones, Barbara and I travelled to France on the S.S. Liberte and toured the great museums of France and Italy until we were forced to return home by news of my Uncle Andrew's death.

In 1962, Faith and Burdette were married. In 1963, we moved back to Harlem to 345 West 145th Street in one of the best buildings in Harlem with 24 hour a day doorman service. We also switched from Our Savior Lutheran School in the Bronx to New Lincoln School. In the summer of 1963, we travelled to Martha's Vineyard for the summer where Faith did the first paintings of her American People Series, which would open at the Spectrum Gallery in the fall of 1967. In the summer of 1967, Barbara and I travelled to Europe for the entire summer with Momma Jones.

I graduated from New Lincoln high school in 1969. In the fall, I would attend Howard University. In the meanwhile, a lot of water had passed under the bridge and I was finally 18 years old. In the course of the 60s, Faith would do some of her most important art works but it was just the beginning. During this period Faith painted exclusively stretched canvases in oil.

Photographs of the Family in the 1960s

www.flickr.com/photos/mjsoulpictures/sets/72157605571408509/

This links goes to a collection of photographs taken of the Ringgold, Wallace, Posey women in the 60s including shots of Faith's wedding to Burdette Ringgold, fashion show pictures, pictures of all of us modelling in Momma Jones' fashion shows.

Hide Little Children by Faith Ringgold

This painting was done by Faith in 1964, the year after we had begun school at New Lincoln in Harlem. It is called Hide Little Children for many reasons I am sure. Among them my mother's concern for our safety in the context of integration in the North. When this painting emerged and she explained that it was about us and our white friends, it gave me a good feeling because I read its message as highly protective. Our play and thus our relationships were hidden from view in an idyllic landscape, but as in William Blake's notion of childhood and innocence, it wasn't going to be possible to grow up, venture out and hold on to that innocence at the same time. That was just about right.



The American People Series #15: Hide Little Children 1964
(Oil on canvas) 36" x 32" Private Collection.