Elizabeth Sackler and Michele Wallace, Photo by Barbara Wallace

Photo by Barbara Wallace.  All rights reserved by Barbara Wallace 2009.

Michele talking to Elizabeth Sackler, founder of the Sackler Center for the Study of Feminist Art at recent party on Central Park South given by Judy Brodsky in anticipation of Faith's 50 Year Retrospective at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ in May 2009. Rutgers is also giving Faith her 21st Honorary Doctorate at their next graduation, where her childhood friend Sonny Rollins will also be honored. The Sackler Center for the Study of Feminist Art now provides a permanent home for Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party. This meticulous installation is well worth seeing by all who are interested in feminist art, even if you don't quite buy Chicago's historical narrative concerning the division of labor.  By the way, Sackler graduated from the New Lincoln School in the 1960s just a few years before me in 1969. 

60s Style--Barbara, Faith and Michele

     The 60s for us was all about style, although not so much about photographs. We're all wearing Afros so Black cultural nationalism is in its heyday.  For all three of us (our little immediate circle composed of Barbara Wallace, Faith Ringgold and Michele Wallace), I have very few photographs particularly in the late 60s.  Not sure why that is except that these were turbulent times and I, myself, as a teenager felt very unsettled.

By the time this photograph is taken for a magazine profile of Faith, (1968-1969), she is 38 and although still teaching full time in the public schools, she is also fully into the swing of her career as an artist and an activist in the black community and the art world.  Barbara is a junior in high school and I am a senior at the New Lincoln School (which would make me 16).  Not sure when it would have been that I  made my statement about not wanting to go to college  but it must have been around this time.  That jump suit made by my grandmother Mme. Willi Posey was my favorite thing to wear.  We are sitting on the livingroom couch at 345 West 145th Street in Harlem.  The couch is covered by those custom made plastic covers designed to protect the furniture.  It really does seem like yesterday in a sense.

Mme. Willi Posey napping on the deck of the S.S. Liberte

Picture probably taken by Michele Wallace, 1961.

It is 1961. My grandmother (pictured here), my sister Barbara, my Mom Faith and I are on our way to France. Mme. Willi Posey, my grandmother, Momma Jones as I then called her, is napping in the comfortable sunlight on the deck of the S.S. Liberte on its last transatlantic voyage.

I just love love this picture. She is wearing her favorite sweater, her head tied up in her favorite sleeping scarf, totally relaxed, totally herself. Yet ready, at a moment's notice, to be of service. Or so I imagined. I loved the perfectly round shape of her head, her eyes, her nose, all perfection. She was 58 years old that summer.

The Prisonhouse of Culture--Part II

PHOTO OF MICHELE (MYSELF) IN FASHION SHOW IN 1970.  DRESS MADE BY MME. WILLI POSEY, MY GRANDMOTHER THE FASHION DESIGNER.  PHOTOGRAPHER TBA.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

PHOTO OF MICHELE (MYSELF) PROTESTING IN FRONT OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART IN SAME DRESS BY MME. WILLI 

POSEY WITH MATCHING PANTS.  WE ALMOST ALWAYS WORE CLOTHES MADE BY MY GRANDMOTHER IN THE 60s.  DETAIL FROM PHOTOGRAPH BY JAN VAN RAAY, 1970.

FOR THE WOMEN'S HOUSE, OIL ON CANVAS 8 FEET BY 8 FEET; 2 DIPTYCHS EACH 4 FEET BY 8 FEET, 1971.
SINGER CENTER ON RIKER'S ISLAND BY FAITH RINGGOLD.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Of course, I haven't actually seen the painting "For The Women's House" since it was originally dedicated at the Women's facility on Riker's Island in 1971, 39 years ago. After that the story of the painting does not end.

At some point subsequent to 1971, the building became a men's prison as the complex of prisons on Riker's Island expanded to hold the incarcerated many, and the men became tired of looking at the women in the main mezzanine and the painting (which Faith had been told could under no circumstances be moved or removed) was relocated to the wall of the cafeteria. Then it was painted over with white house paint in preparation for a new painting by an unknown prison artist.

However, his ambitions (or his sentence) were not equal to the 8 by 8 feet blank white canvas (with images of the women surely insinuating themselves through the house paint, no match for oil paint in the scheme of things). Thus, the canvases (a diptych) were moved again, this time to the basement.

A woman guard who remembered the painting's former glory and Faith on her own intiative found Faith and told her what was happening and that the canvases were soon slated for disposal. This was sometime in the 90s. Faith went to the Commissioner of Prisons.

As it turns out, the prisons (along with every other institution of the City of New York) have extensive and longstanding art collections given to them over the years. The Commissioner rescued the painting from the basement on Riker's Island, brought it to his headquarters, raised the $25,000 needed to remove the white house paint and restore the original oil paint. By the by, if it had been acrylic paint, all would have been lost.

And then the painting was ceremoniously reinstalled at the new women's facility (the Singer Center) on Riker's Island at a great height and safeguarded in all sorts of new and novel ways. Except that the Neuberger Museum at Purchase promises to remove it from its perch one more time to include it in Faith's exhibition of her 60s works in the fall. I am thrilled that I will have a chance to see this object of my youth once again. Will it be as I remembered it. There will be another chance to photograph it under the best of conditions since I doubt the present jpgs for all their glory really capture anything like the actual colors, not to mention oil paint changes and deepens over time.

Faith told the story of "For The Women's House" with much more colorful embellishments and laughs at the Museum of Modern Art in the Education Center in discussion with Lisa Farrington and at the invitation of the Friends of Education this past Wednesday night. I am hoping that their technicians were successful in capturing both the tape of the interview and the videotape (more successful than they were in projecting Faith's powerpoint retrospective of her 50 years of art work, which appeared bleached beyond recognition) because Faith was as brilliant and amusing as a body could be in the space of less than an hour.

She will be 80 October 8th (God willing). I just can't believe it. Independently of everything, I just adore 80 year old women. There is something about that particular perspective on the past that is so fascinating to me, perhaps because it is the only perspective that remains beyond my present imagination. Or perhaps it is simply that after all these years I am finally allowing myself to become fully enchanted by Faith's riveting and constant accomplishments as an artist. The sheer breathe is dazzling even for a daughter.

I've given up fighting it and seeing the other side. Why shouldn't her work be taken as seriously as the great male African American artists Jacob Lawrence or William Johnson, whose works have been celebrated and lionized by the Whitney and the Modern? Because she is a woman?

Why shouldn't her work be taken as seriously as the great women sculptors Louise Bourgeoise or Louise Nevelson? Because she is a painter whose work is often figurative?

Why shouldn't she be considered in the same breathe with the great American painter Georgia O'Keefe, whose work grows more beautiful with each decade? Because Faith sometimes did work such as "For the Women's House," which was deliberately and explicitly propagandistic and political?

Why shouldn't I say so when nobody else will at the Museum of Modern Art or on Facebook or anywhere else I care to? Because I am her daughter, and should know better than to advocate for family?

Why in the world does Modernism, which was supposed to break all the rules, have all these completely insane and completely dysfunctional rules, despites its disdain for "irritable reaching after fact and reason? "

Nevermind. That question is rhetorical. I know the answer oh so well. Because if it didn't, there would be so much junk in the Museum of Modern Art, and every other museum you wouldn't be able to make a path through the crap. It would be like the Collyer Brothers row townhouse in Harlem in 1948 when the police found both of them dead and dessicating under the fallen rubble. Only ten times worse.

Unfortunately, at the Friends Event, there was little time for discussion and not much will to discuss. I think perhaps many of Faith's listeners were shocked into silence and disbelief as she described the unbelievable ordeal of one absolutely obsessed black women's effort to be a major artist in the latter half of the 20th century in a modernist canonical environment. The Museum of Modern Art has often been in our lives. But as Faith said, nobody wants to hear an old woman complain. And so she didn't, which made her message and her meaning, I would guess, all the more cryptic for her listeners who have had so little opportunity to hear her speak and to view her work in New York.

Faith spoke in a small screening room. When I sat down front in a sparsely populated room as the convenor made a point of mentioning that this event would start on time because she appreciated punctuality. So I didn't notice as the room's seats steadily filled.

In the lobby, there was an enormous crowd that I would imagine had never gotten into the auditorium--I don't know whether they had been turned away because the room was full or because they had come to greet others in the lobby. There were many late arrivals among the black bourgeoisie (which is the main constituency of this group), as their evenings had been divided by at least one other event attended that very same night by the Met's Multicultural Committee in consortium with the Links, 100 Black Women and 100 Black Men at the Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrating the new Picasso exhibition that had opened that night.

Recently, I was skimming through photos taken by the great 60s photographer Jan Van Raay of some of the protest activities in the art world that Faith and I engaged in when suddenly I found myself not only looking at a photo of myself at a protest in 1970 in front of the Museum of Modern Art but also wearing a dress that my grandmother made (which is how I actually recognized myself), and which I had modeled in one of her fashion shows that very year. As a coda to the vagaries of the late 60s, early 70s I present them. In 1970, I was 18 and a student at the City College of New York where I had ended up after a riotous semester at Howard University. When I got back to New York, Faith was caught up full swing in the protests of the Art Worker's Coalition and Museum and I could do naught but join in. In those days, although I was credited with much originality (I think because of my youth and physical beauty), I was in fact little more than a cipher, an appendage of my mother's vigorous and determined campaign to set the art world on its heels. It was invigorating nonetheless. And I like the pictures of it more and more as the decades go by. 

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.