Take Your Time #16
we have poetry so we do not die of history
6 ways you can support Palestinians in Gaza: “We pulled out people who were in an unbearable state. We pulled out children who were in pieces. We pulled out young and elderly people. The fire in the camp was unreal.” - Mohammed Abuassa, who rushed to the scene in the north-western neighborhood of Tel al-Sultan, told the Associated Press. I have no words for the horrors that we all witnessed in Rafah. An Israeli airstrike ignited fires that spread quickly through tents and makeshift accommodations, killing 45, including many children. This American Friends Service Committee resource hasn’t been updated since this attack on Rafah, but I wanted to share it anyway in case you haven’t seen it. Ceasefire now and forever.
Divesting for Palestinian Rights: American Friends Service Committee also has a guide for how to divest for Palestinian rights, including a list of “publicly traded companies that consistently, knowingly, and directly enable or facilitate human rights violations or violations of international law as part of prolonged military occupations, apartheid, and genocide.”
Illustration
I’m thrilled to share this painting I did as an assignment for class. The only criterion was to include a color wheel in our painting, which I painted over to make it more cohesive. (Hint: It’s one of the oranges! Send me your guesses!). I knew I wanted to paint fruit and put my color theory skills to the test. I was inspired by Frida Kahlo’s Still Life inspired with Parrot and Fruit.
Inspiration
The indomitable “pioneering painter, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, author, teacher, and activist” Faith Ringgold passed away at 93 on April 12, 2024. She’s known for many works: quilts, children’s books, large-scale paintings, and more. She’s uncategorizable and has a vast expanse of work I look forward to exploring more and more. For this issue, however, I’m inspired by her series American People 1963–67, which consists of 20 paintings. It’s worth mentioning the historical context she painted American People in: “Weeks after King’s [1963] speech, four girls were murdered in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Riots and protests spread across Harlem in 1964; Malcolm X was assassinated in February 1965; the Watts Rebellion shook Los Angeles in August of the same year; and during the Long Hot Summer of 1967 when Ringgold was making the paintings, forty-three people died in race-related uprisings in Detroit, and twenty-six much closer by in Newark, New Jersey.” This series directly addresses these events and amplifies their impacts.
In Hide Little Children, five faces of children peek out from the foliage, almost like ripe fruit or baby birds. It’s hard to see any other part of their bodies, which are obscured by the greenery like they are protected by nature. The title of the painting suggests something darker (not hide and seek). One of Ringgold’s daughters, Michele Wallace, wrote of this painting, “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 (innocence must be lost to grow up), it wasn't going to be possible (for us) to grow up, venture out, and hold on to that innocence at the same time.” When I look at Hide Little Children, I think of the children of Gaza. Israel has killed at least 15,000 (Al-Jazeera), injured more than 12,000 (UNICEF), and left at least 17,000 children unaccompanied or separated (UNICEF).
The self-representation of women in their private moments is one of my favorite images in art. These images can be more honest, intimate, vulnerable, and moving than traditional portraits. Ringgold references a long visual history of Western art depicting women in these private moments: bathing, in front of vanities and mirrors, primping, and grooming. In Woman Looking in a Mirror, a woman (maybe Ringgold?) sits in a red chair and gazes into a hand mirror. Does the face of the woman match the one in the mirror? Is it how she sees herself? Mirrors can deceive us and show us the truth simultaneously. Writer Jennifer Higgie wrote of mirrors: “What is rarely mentioned in cultural histories of the mirror is how liberating it was for female painters. For millennia, for reasons of propriety, women were forbidden from depicting themselves or anyone else naked while men could paint and sculpt however they saw fit…Easier access to mirrors meant that, for the first time, a woman’s exclusion from life classes at art academies didn’t stop her from painting figures. Now, with the aid of a looking glass, she had a willing model, and one who was freely available around the clock: herself.” You’ve noticed in my other issues I’ve written about how women artists managed to express themselves and build worlds despite restrictions. This quote shows another great example of how women slyly used the domestic to transcend its confines.
“We thought of the American flag as our symbol of freedom, but we were losing our freedoms in the 60s. All the blood laying all over the sidewalk. Nothing about it in the papers. I mean silence, like it didn't happen.” Ringgold said of the American flag.
Behind the flag stands a Black man with a hand over his bleeding heart pledging to the flag and a knife in the other, a white woman in a dress that seems to blend into her skin, and a white man with arms akimbo. The stars and stripes obscure and trap the three of them to various degrees. 1967, the year Ringgold painted The Flag is Bleeding, was considered a turning point in the fight for civil rights known as the “long, hot summer.” Over 100 protests erupted, met by police violence, mainly across East Coast and Midwestern cities, following white police officers maiming or murdering an unarmed Black man “for a seemingly minor infraction.” Following these protests, President Johnson established a bipartisan task force known as the Kerner Commission, whose report concluded, “This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white -- separate and unequal. White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities."
Ringgold forces us to face the realities of race in this country and the violence and brutality and erasure of that violence against Black people. Notably missing from this painting is a Black woman, of which Ringgold said, “Black women were literally out of the picture. Period.”
I have seen Die in person at the Museum of Modern Art, and my eyes always go to the terrified children clutching at one another in the foreground. They sit on the ground, witnessing the violence around them, without shoes, holding one another, and looking right at us. Looking at this painting is like reading the news and being unable to do much except bear witness. Ringgold painted Die in 1967 in addition to The Flag is Bleeding, and it directly addresses the racial violence that occurred that year.
Ringgold and her two daughters visited MoMA in the 1960s and saw Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting, Guernica, which depicts the bombing of the town of Guernica in Basque during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso influenced Ringgold, and it’s easy to see the connections between Guernica and Die compositionally, stylistically, and thematically. Ringgold said in 2020: “I was just trying to read the times, and to me everyone was falling down. And if it upsets people that’s because I want them to be upset.”
While working on Die, Ringgold was actively trying to make museums more inclusive. She helped lead the Black caucus in the Art Workers Coalition, which pressured museum museums, namely MoMA, to exhibit more women artists and artists of color. (We also have them to thank for the free-admission days!)
As a woman of color and visual artist of color, I owe so much to Faith Ringgold. Not only does she inspire me to paint and create fearlessly and relentlessly, but she has also helped me realize that I have a place in art and see myself there. Thank you, Ms. Ringgold.
Ideas
From Elena Kanagy-Loux’s, My Grandma’s Doilies Are Not a Joke, I pulled the quote, “When will art institutions begin to pay respect to the legacies of our foremothers’ artistry? And when will we, as a culture, move beyond rigid hierarchies of value and celebrate domestic crafts in their own right?”
I have a dozen or so embroidered or hand-painted handkerchiefs and a couple of pillowcases my grandmother made me. I usually always have one in my purse because I have hyperhidrosis and can quickly rely on one of these handkerchiefs to dry my hands or pat the skin above my upper lip. She often embroidered or painted butterflies, flowers, and or my initials. Why couldn’t these be in a museum? What makes them a craft and not an art?
I read Nathan Heller’s New Yorker article, The Battle for Attention, a crazy ride through how the military or tech companies created the attention economy and the ways people defy that economy (a secret society that meets to stare deeply at museum paintings for 30 minutes, for example). I immediately thought of Adrienne Maree Brown’s quote, “What we pay attention to grows.” Attention builds or creates something tangible. It does more than draw our focus. It’s creating something else entirely between you and what you are paying attention to. When you look at a work of art, say a statue, Heller writes, “the stone doesn’t change, but the artwork we see does because we are continually noticing different things” and “It means only that an artwork is neither a physical thing nor a viewer’s mental image of it but something in between, created in attentive space.”
Jason Chen’s New York Times Style Magazine cover story, The Beginners' Hall of Fame, profiles six late bloomers whose creative work is up and coming. I love to be a beginner and have more questions than answers. After turning 35 last month, which feels like a milestone or more weighted age, there are fewer opportunities to be a beginner, and at the same time, I’m more capable than ever and want to try anything! I love stories of people finding a new passion, realizing it was there all along, or finally being recognized later in life.
Ending
This is a poem by Meena Alexander called Question Time, which is the title of the newsletter, “we have poetry so we do not die of history.” Like the author, I don’t know what this means, nor could I explain how history or poetry are different. But it seems powerful to say that poetry, for all its frivolity, has the antidote to the weight of history.
I remember the scarred spine
Of mountains the moon slips through,Fox fire in a stump, bushes red with blisters,
Her question, a woman in a sweatshirt,Hand raised in a crowded room-
What use is poetry?Above us, lights flickered,
Something wrong with the wiring.I turned and saw the moon whirl in water,
The Rockies struck with a mauve light,Sea creatures cut into sky foliage.
In the shadow of a shrub once you and IBrushed lips and thighs,
Dreamt of a past that frees its prisoners.Standing apart I looked at her and said-
We have poetrySo we do not die of history.
I had no idea what I meant.