American People #1: Between Friends

American People #1: Between Friends by Faith Ringgold (1963), 

Oil on Canvas, 40 x 24 inches.  All rights reserved.

 That summer of 1963 I took the girls to Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts.  We had been invited to spend the summer there on the estate of Dr. and Mrs. Goldsberry of Wooster . . . .

"That summer of 1963 was the beginning of my mature work.  I planned to paint five paintings in my new style, which I called “Super Realism.”  The idea was to make a statement in my art about the Civil Rights Movement and what was happening to black people in America at that time, and to make it super-real.   

Painting outdoors has its own problem, not the least of which is the insects that fly into the wet oil paint and get stuck there.  But I survived the insects and the sun, and produced the first of the twenty-odd paintings of my American People Series.

The first painting, Between Friends, depicting an uneasy meeting between a black and a white woman, was inspired by the women who came to weekday poker parties at the Goldsberry’s house while their husbands were in their offices in town.  The Goldsberrys were lifetime members of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and entertained an interracial group of high powered friends.  I thought the white women were simply representing their husbands, and I could sense a lot of distance between friendship and what these women were sharing. "

From WE FLEW OVER THE BRIDGE: THE MEMOIRS OF FAITH RINGGOLD, Duke University Press (originally published 1995) 2005 (144-45) 

Neighbors

American People #3: Neighbors by Faith Ringgold. Oil on canvas, 42 x 24 inches. 

All rights reserved.

"Neighbors" was about the not-so-neighborly greeting of three generations of a white family living next door to a black family who had just moved in.

From We Flew Over the Bridge:  The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold, Duke University Press (145) 

Mr. Charlie

In the summer of 1965 I had heard that Harry Belafonte was interested in black artists and was collecting their work.  I went to his offices on West 57th Street where his secretary told me that his business manager, Sy Siegel, bought all of his paintings for him.  So I took several of my paintings from the American People Series to show to Mr. Siegel.  One was Mr. Charlie, a large grinning head of a patronizing white man. Another called The Cocktail Party was a social gathering with one black person.  The final canvas I brought was The American Dream, which presented a woman, half white, half black, showing off her huge diamond ring.  Mr. Siegel turned red.  He growled menacingly: "I don't know who these people are." Waving his hand at the paintings, he went on angrily.  "And I don't know what they're doing."  (He was looking at The In Crowd, a scene of white men piled in a power pyramid with black men on the bottom.)

American People #6: Mr. Charlie by Faith Ringgold,  

1964 Oil on Canvas, 33 by 18 inches.  All rights reserved.

I tried to explain the scene to him.  "You see the white man has his hand on this black man's mouth because he doesn't want him to speak out about the injustice in the black community.  We call him 'Uncle Tom,' and we call him"--pointing ot the grinning white face--"Mr. Charlie."

"Well, you wanted me to see them and I've seen them," Mr. Siegel thundered.  He turned and left the outer office, slamming the door in my face."

Faith Ringgold, from WE FLEW OVER THE BRIDGE: THE MEMOIRS OF FAITH RINGGOLD, Duke University Press 2005, (148-149)

The In Crowd

American People #8: The In Crowd by Faith Ringgold, 1964

Oil on Canvas, 48 x 26 inches.  All rights reserved.

"Nobody I knew seemed to have time just to talk about ideas or problems, except my mother.  She never got tired of listening.  I knew I worried her during those years, but she held on to me, and I to her."

 "Other older artists wrote my painting off as 'protest' art, sometimes even dismissing them as merely history painting or social realism.  They were mostly people who had been badly burned during the Communist scare in the fifties and now wanted to keep their noses and palettes clean.  Art for them was an abstraction, a fragment of an idea that nobody could understand, much less condemn.  However, I had called my art 'Super Realism' because I wanted my audience to make a personal connection with its images and messages.  The older artists were cautious—“half-stepping,” as they used to say in the sixties—trying to get by in the art world and not drawing attention to their blackness.  'Art is art.  Quality is the important thing.  It doesn’t matter what color you are' was their message.  They knew there was little or no support for artists in the black community—so what could be gained by alienating friends and contacts in the white art world?  On the other hand, I was not concerned with friends or enemies..  Being unknown and a newcomer, I had neither.  I was concerned with making truthful statements in my art and having it seen.  Younger black artists objected to my paintings of white people.  Some neither understood nor accepted my need to make images of anyone but black people. Others, I was told, felt that my steely-eyed white faces were going too damn far."

Faith Ringgold, from WE FLEW OVER THE BRIDGE: THE MEMOIRS OF FAITH RINGGOLD. Duke University Press 2005 (147-148).