Benefit Prints

Faith Ringgold, The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, 1996

The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles

Faith Ringgold, The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, 1996, six-color lithograph, 22 x 30 in., edition of 100

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About the Work

Inspired by her French Collection series, Faith Ringgold created The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, a cheery six-color lithograph based on her quilt of the same name from 1992, as the first print designed to support CAA’s program of Professional Development Fellowships, inaugurated in 1993. The artiist collaborated with Eileen N. Foti, a master printer at the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper (renamed the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions in 2006), to produce the work.

Ringgold has been creating her signature “story quilts” for more than thirty years. Her first, Echoes of Harlem (1980), made in collaboration with her mother, Willie Posie, allowed the artist to use her knowledge of Tibetan tankas in forming her own unique genre. Later, she introduced text into the quilts, forming narratives created from her vivid imagination and several of her childhood memories and experiences in America and abroad. Two series in particular, The French Collection I and II, are composed of twelve quilts chronicling the life of a young fictitious character, Willi Marie Simone, who travels from America to Paris in the 1920s at the age of sixteen to pursue her lifelong ambition of becoming une artiste. While there, she marries an affluent Frenchman, models for Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, and encounters an international cadre of influential personages.

Set in Vincent van Gogh’s garden in Arles, France, The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles becomes the meeting place for Willa Marie and several historical African American heroines to promote freedom. Each of the eight women is a significant contributor to the African American experience: Madam C. J. Walker, the first self-made black female millionaire; Harriet Tubman, the initiator and leader of the Underground Railroad; and Rosa Parks, a civil-rights activist, just to name a few. Even van Gogh, voyeuristically peeking out from behind a sunflower, cannot resist a glimpse of these “superwomen.” Like our own mothers, they have become the brick and mortar of African American history. While Willa Marie draws strength from these role models, her efforts to become an artist differ from their respective struggles. It is in their search as black women that all find common ground.

Writing about the original quilt in the New York Times, the critic Roberta Smith notes, “This tribute to female solidarity and individual struggle gets its real force from Ms. Ringgold’s contrasting depictions of the quilted sunflowers and the painted sunflower field, which make their own political point in purely visual terms. In short, the artist juxtaposes the solitary, traditionally male activity of painting with the collective, traditionally female one of quilting, while fusing their different visual effects into a single work of art.”

An active force in CAA since the 1970s, Ringgold has served on the Board of Directors and helped to devise the fellowship program. She also was instrumental in compiling CAA’s Directory of People of Color in the Visual Arts (1993). Ringgold won CAA’s Distinguished Feminist Award in 2011, and a working print of Sunflower Quilting Bee graces the cover of the recently published book on the history of the organization, The Eye, the Hand, the Mind, edited by Susan Ball, CAA executive director from 1986 to 2006. The artist’s most recent exhibition, American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold’s Paintings of the 1960s, was organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art in 2010.

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