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The Mona Lisa Interview: With Faith Ringgoldby Michele Wallace

Order this illustrated interview on CD rom for $25 from the Requests page.

Any attempt to describe the contemporary scene among Afro-American artists isdoomed from the outset in that there is so much variety and productivity, at the sametime that there is so little commensurate recognition in the market place and in criticalcircles. Afro-American artists, such as Romare Bearden, Richard Mayhew, VincentSmith, Norman Lewis, Archibald Motley, Rose Piper, Louis Mailou Jones, ElizabethCatlett, Aaron Douglass, Charles White and Jacob Lawrence have been highlyproductive throughout this century. Since the 60s, there has been an even greaterproliferation of black artists working in a variety of media. In her history of AfricanAmerican Artists, Sharon Patton does an excellent job of documenting the range ofartists earlier in the century as well as those still working today. 1

The question for me, however, is how one can get beyond the inventory stage to theidentification of some paradigmatic qualities in Afro-American artists. Is there such athing as Afro-American art? Probably not. It would be too much of a coincidence thatthe phenotype of racial blackness would always, or even often coincide with a certainseries of aesthetic moves and gestures. As for ethnicity and culture, the debate as towhether Afro-American artists have made some outstanding contribution to the fieldstemming from their distinct cultural and ethnic legacy has never been adequatelysettled. One of the reasons this question continues to be so hard to respond to isbecause I believe that African American visual artists have perhaps their own culture ofsorts, a culture in which they remain marginal to the mainstreams of black culture butnevertheless solidly within a parrellel or off-shoot of black traditions. That tradition Iwould designate as a kind of black bohemia, frequently situated in close proximity tothe black community, or even more often in association with other kinds of black artistsand intellectuals, musicians, academics, crafts people of one kind of another,depending upon whether the central community is highly educated or not. Everywhereyou look thoroughly in African American life, you will find visual artists of some sort--people who work in wood or stone, or who paint, or perhaps do wonderful gardens andcook wonderful meals. They don't necessarily stand out or seek glory, and there aren'tvast numbers of them for it isn't usually a profitable undertaking which engages them.They must be sought but they are there.

Even as we need to put aside the notion of an intrinsically black art that we can clearly

differentiate from the art of other ethnicities and races, we can still acknowledge thefact that people who happen to be Afro-Americans who are also artists have to contendwith more than their fair share of anonymity and neglect in the art world. Afro-Americans, with few exceptions, do not recognize visual art as an important componentin their lives and their budgets. Moreover, the international field of art collectors andmuseums do not feel particularly compelled to collect black artists, apart from a fewexceptions.

With good reason, a short list of names are better known and more widely collectedthan others--Jean Michel Basquiat, Martin Puryear, David Hammons, Carrie MaeWeems, Lyle Ashton Harris, Robert Colescott, and Kara Walker. We hear these namesoften in the public domain. Whether their financial success is commensurate with theirnotoriety I do not know. There is the much longer list of noteworthy black artists whoare less widely known at the moment: Barbara Chase Riboud, Helen Ramsaran, BettyBlayton, Howardina Pindell, Richard Mayhew, Ernest Chrichlow, David Driskell, HaleWoodruff, Arthur Coppedge, William T. Williams, Beverly McIver, Renee Stout and soon. One thing is for sure. The list of collectors known for the acquisition of Afro-American artists is much shorter. The ones I know are Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan,Bill and Camille Cosby, George Wein, Peter and Eileen Norton, and Judith Leiber.

In many ways, the art world seems to be all about money because nothing can happenin the art world without money. People who have money control values and flows, andhave to be made to understand the terms upon which opinions in art evolve anddevelop, at least sufficiently to assure them that the investment of their wealth in suchemphemeral activities as creative artists may pursue will not result in significant lossand may, indeed, lead to substantial financial profit. Art is perhaps one of the riskiestinvestments but it is also one of the most lucrative in both long and short run.

Nonetheless, even though from one perspective it may seem as though money is alland everything in the art world--because the values of works of art are so identified withtheir associations with the material wealth of its owners and the institutions (museums)that house them--the fact is that art from the standpoint of production and inspirationhas little to do with, and even less in common with the pursuit of wealth. People whoare determined to be rich, don't usually become artists. And people who aredetermined to make art, don't usually become rich. In the end, even if they do amasssome wealth, it is comparatively little in relation to the great fortunes that subsequentgenerations may amass off the sale and resale of works of art. Eventually, the work ofart becomes priceless, which simply means that it can no longer afford to beexchanged. It's like a supernova--too hot to function as a unit of exchange in our solarsystem.

Although the story of Vincent Van Gogh is perhaps a kind of hunger-artist fantasy ofthe dominant culture, there is a sense in which the artist exists in tension with his or herown ability to produce valuable product. This may, indeed, be why the maverickimpulse in the art world has tended since the 60s to move away from the production ofmaterial objects, such as paintings and sculpture, and more in the direction of theconceptual event--installations and found objects that have no instrinsic value butwhose value resides in their arrangement and temporality. But the thing that must beunderstood by those who worry over the outrageous economic values of the work of artis that the spiritual and the emphemeral, the energy of creativity is always the mostimportant component of a work of art. It is why artists create and it is why those of us

who cannot afford to own art visit it in museums, write about it and study it.

What this book is all about is acknowledging the extraordinary contribution Afro-American culture has made to American modernisms via a series of circumstancespeculiar to the socio-economic and cultural situation of Afro-Americans in the Africandiaspora. One can get some idea of the complexity of such a formulation throughreading Ira Berlin's Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery inNorth America (Harvard UP, 1998). Some of the work on the archaeology of plantationslavery, such as Laurie A. Wilkie's Creating Freedom: Material Culture and AfricanAmerican Identity at Oakley Plantation, Louisiana, 1840-1950 (LSU 2000), JohnMichael Vlach's Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Univ. ofNC Press, 1993) and the impressive exhibition catalogue Before Freedom: African-American Life in the Antebellum South (Richmond and Charlottesville, NC: TheMuseum of the Confederacy and the Univ of Virginia, 1991) are bringing historicalinterpretation of the slave community together with an analysis of material culture in theplantation environment in both the antebellum and postbellum period. As ManthiaDiawara points out, the harsh conditions of segregation and apartheid that markedAfro-American cultural development may have given rise to an extraordinary modernistinitiative and inventiveness. The subsequent accomplishments are recognized andacknowledged in the fields of music, dance, fashion, religion, oral traditions, cuisine,folk culture, humor, performance but generally not in material and visual culture. Thisessay is all about adding material and visual culture to the list of Afro-Americancontributions to Euro-American modernism.

A volume would be required to document the range of such accomplishments in detail,especially since WWII. Instead, I am choosing to focus upon the work of FaithRinggold, an exemplary Afro-American artist who is also my mother, and from time totime draw upon the works of other African American artists who have either influencedher or made similar, comparable or subsequent aesthetic and formal contributions toher own. By so doing, I hope to suggest a process that might be used to construct ananalysis of Afro-American modernisms in relationship in turn to both EuropeanModernism and Afro-American culture. The point would be to finally recognize howcrucial this knowledge could be to our transition from our present condition, in which weare haunted in so many ways by the vestiges of psychological slavery, to a condition ofspiritual freedom and full psychic citizenship. The ability to reinvent oneself, to reinventthe space around you to reflect your status in the world, to project images of a newworld and new generations is the thing we continue to lack. But it isn't because thematerial isn't available. It is right at hand. All we need do is to exploit a heritage thatalready exists.

(Figure 112--Alfred H. Barr, "The Development of Abstract Art," 1936)

In 1936, Alfred H. Barr Junior prepared a chart for the catalogue of his exhibitionCubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art. The chart was entitled "TheDevelopment of Abstract Art," and it shows the flow of various world traditions of artinto the development of an international Modernism, or "abstract art." Right in themiddle of it is a little box called "Negro Sculpture" which is connected by a single arrowto "Cubism." The only two other non-European influences that are mentioned are"Japanese Prints," and "Near Eastern Art," both of which have two arrows. JapanesePrints have arrows to "Synthesism," with which Gauguin's name is associated, andFauvism. Near Eastern Art has arrows to "Expressionism" and Fauvism. With these

three terms: Negro Sculpture, Japanese Prints and Near Eastern Art, influences frombeyond Europe are disposed of.

Of course, this is no more than wishful thinking and selective amnesia from which eventhe Museum of Modern Art had somewhat recovered by 1984 and "Primitivism" in 20thCentury Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern organized by the curator WilliamRubin.2 The category of "Negro Sculpture" has graduated to "The Arrival of TribalObjects in the West" with chapters devoted to "From North America," "From Oceania,"and "From Africa." But what has not changed is the special status of non-white artists inEurope and the U.S., who are equally invisible and inconsequential in bothformulations. Through the dichotomizing of the so-called "primitive world," (with whichartists of color are associated by ethnic origin) and European modernism, which isconsidered to be organically the province of racially white, and usually male, artists, akind of cultural shell game results in the disappearance of artists of color, regardless ofthe nature or quality of their work. The dominant paradigm renders their existence andtheir work inconceivable and irrelevant. Besides the point, you might say. In the rarecases in which such superlative Diasporic Modernists such as Wilfredo Lam, MartinPuryear and Jean Michel Basquiat appear to challenge the dominant paradigm, theyare automatically declared the exceptions which prove the rule: black contribution tovisual modernism don't matter. Various African American artists have dealt with thisbumpy terrain differently.

Faith Ringgold lays out tantalizing features of her program in her series of paintingscalled the French Collection, which narrates the highpoints of the life of a fictionalcharacter named Willia Marie, based upon an amalgamation of the artist and hermother Willi Posey, the fashion designer, as a young girl, as well as dashes ofJosephine Baker and other courageous and flamboyant young women of color of theearly twentieth century. Willa Marie, whose ambition is to be an important artist, goesfrom "dancing at the Louvre" with her friend and her children, relieved that her ownchildren are in the U.S. being raised by her sister, to throwing her bridal bouquet intothe Seine in a fit of ambivalence over her marriage to a rich French man, to paintingFaith's friends and sponsors (including myself) at Giverny, to a quilting bee in asunflower field with the likes of Ella Baker and Sojourner Truth.

Figure 113--Faith Ringgold, "Dancing at the Louvre."

Figure 114--Faith Ringgold, "Wedding on the Seine"

Figure 115--Faith Ringgold, "Picnic at Giverny"

Figure 116--Faith Ringgold, "Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles"

In her endeavor to be taken seriously on the art scene in Paris, she poses nude forboth Henri Matisse and Picasso.

Figure 117--"Matisse's Model"

Figure 118--"Picasso's Studio"

While posing for Picasso, she communes with the spirits of his African masks and withthe women in "Les Demoiselles D'Avignon." Both insist that she has as much right to

be an artist as does Picasso because she is a woman, because she is black. She hobnobs with James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and ErnestHemingway at the home of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

Figure 119--"Dinner at Gertrude Stein's"

Figure 120--"Cafe des Artistes"

At a meeting at Cafe des Artistes, which includes an array of important black artists ofthe twentieth century, she joins other women in issuing "the Colored Woman'sManifesto of Art and Politics." The male artists who provide her audience are William H.Johnson, Arcihbald Motley, Sargent Johnson, Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglass,Henry O. Tanner, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, Ed Clark, Raymond Saunders,Jacob Lawrence, Toulouse-Lautrec and Maurice Utrillo. They are dismissive but sheshouts them down with the help of her female comrades: Elizabeth Catlett, MetaWarwick Fuller, Edmonia Lewis, Faith Ringgold and Lois Mailou Jones. She says:

I am an international colored woman. My African ancestry dates back to the beginningsof human origins, 9 million years ago in Ethiopia. The art and culture of Africa has beenstolen by western Europeans and my people have been colonized, enslaved andforgotten. What is very old has become new. And what was black has become white."We Wear the Mask" but it has a new use as cubist art. . . . Modern art is not yours, ormine. It is ours.

Ringgold's "American Collection," which immediately follows the "French Collection,"continues the story of Willia Marie with a particular focus on her daugher Marlena, whois also an artist.

Figure 121--"We Came to America"

The first work in the series, "We Came to America," illustrates a stunning dream imagein the harbor of New York. A slaveship, echoing the ship in Turner's "Slave ship," isburning in the background while the naked slaves are ecstatic and dispersed walkingon water. In the middle is a black statue of liberty holding a baby with one hand and atorch to light the way of the slaves in the other. This image stems in part from the latestresearch on the origins of the statue of liberty. Apparently it was originally intended bythe French to be black and to memorialize the emancipation of the slaves. But thedeclining fortunes of the former slaves in the U.S. after the failure of Reconstructionand the reconciliation of the North and the South, militated against this approach andthe decision was made to render a more classical and anonymous image with greaterreference to the first American revolution, not the second--the Civil War.

One of the most stunning works of the American Collection is the image devoted toBessie Smith.

Figure 122--"Bessie's Blues"

Influenced by the photographic repetitions of Andy Warhol, Ringgold designed aniconic representation of Bessie Smith, and repeats in it in a grid.

Figure 123-- "The Two Jemimas"

The "Two Jemimas," which harks back to her first story quilt, "Who's Afraid of AuntJemima?" in 1983, crosses Aunt Jemima with De Koonings "Two Women in theCountry" to explore and explode the notion of female ugliness.

Figure 124--Willem de Kooning, "Two Women in the Country"

Figure 125-- "Listen to the Trees"

Figure 126--"Picnic on the Grass"

"Listen to the Trees" and "Picnic on the Grass" both interrogate the problematics ofsolitude for the black female artist, the necessity for autonomy, integrity and self-esteem in order to accomplish one's work. An interview with the artist Faith Ringgoldfollows, further exploring the minutiae of the French Collection and the AmericanCollection.

M: I just wanted to ask you some very specific details with both of us looking at theworks of the French Collection and the American Collection. As you see, we are nowboth looking at "Dancing at the Louvre." I have the book open before us. I wanted toask you some questions about this image. If we look at it as a painting, Willia Marie isin the Louvre with her friend who is there with her three children. They are in the roomwith the Mona Lisa and two other paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, and people whohave written about it, including myself, have pointed out the subjects of the paintings inthe background and of the people you can see in the foreground are both mothers anddaughters. Now you have said elsewhere that the model for Willia Marie is you, themodel for the friend is my sister Barbara, and the model for the three children areBarbara's three children.--Martha, Teddy and Faith.

F: Well, I don't know that the model for Willia Marie is me. I thought that the model forWillia Marie was actually my mother, whose name is Willi.

M: So as time goes on, you think that the model for Willia Marie is Momma Jones.

F: I never thought it was me.

M: Because there is a sense in which you fit into the scenario as well.

F: Well, yeah, because I admired her.

M: As you were saying. The model for Willa Marie is Momma Jones. This scenarioraises memories, at least for me, of 1961 when we went to Paris with Momma Jonesand you and me and Barbara were there. Barbara and I were children, and thereforedid not act perhaps completely appropriately in the museum and wanted to go outsideand get ice cream and so forth. I don't know that we were exactly dancing in themuseum but we were running around . . .

F: I think that's where I got the idea of dancing because you were breaking the rulesand acting outside of the French culture in the Louvre. People were following us . . .

M: They were . . .

F: Yeah.

M: Why were they following us?

F: Because I was running behind you.

M: We were running?

F: We were running through the Louvre because we couldn't find the "Mona Lisa." Wewere looking for the "Mona Lisa." We couldn't find it. They really wanted you to go allover the museum before you found it. Whereas today it is very easy to find it becausethe museum is all split up, its centralized, it's just really different. But in those days itwasn't and you all wanted to be outside getting glace.

M: And the ice cream was right outside.

F: And the ice cream people were right outside. You just couldn't figure why youcouldn't just go do that. As I would move through the museum, I would see otherpaintings that I wanted to talk to you all about

M: So you were talking to us about other paintings.

F: Uh-huh. So these French people were . . .

M: Amazed.

F: Blown away. You know, here's these two little black girls and their mother and themother is giving them some sort of lecture about the paintings in the museum and thelittle children are not at all interested. I mean you were very young, what eight and nine,and all this is going on, and she's making them go through--we don't know what she islooking for--so they just followed us.

M: Because I guess they couldn't understand what you were saying.

F: They didn't.

M: So how much of a crowd did we have behind us?

F: We had a nice little crowd.

M: We always had a crowd in Europe.

F: We had a nice little crowd. People followed us everywhere we went. We're talking1961, and if you know what is going on in America at the time you realize that blackpeople were very much the central focus of what was happening in the world, and therewere all these newspaper headlines of black people in Birmingham, and Martin LutherKing, and the dogs and the hoses. All of this stuff. And they just sort of looked at uslike, how did you get here?

M: How did you get through the dogs?

F: How did you get past the dogs and the fire hoses and all of it? And then you are overhere looking at art of all things.

M: Leonardo da Vinci, of all things!

F: Uh-huh. And it just doesn't fit. So I was determined that you two were going to seethis "Mona Lisa."

M: So we had become another sight in the museum.

F: I didn't have the idea, like somebody said to me, because you may never get thereagain. I never thought that. Not for one second.

M: Why were you particularly determined that we should see the "Mona Lisa?" As Irecall, this was before the world tour.

F: Just before.

M: I don't remember anything about why it was such a great painting.

F: Because it has lived for 400 years. Everybody loves it. I mean it is a wonderful,wonderful painting.

M: So it was really famous even then. Even though they didn't have it centrally located.

F: They didn't know how to do that then. Museums were not that modern then.

M: Museums were not places where a lot of people went?

F: Well, they didn't have tours like they do today.

M: They didn't?

F: They had tours. But not like now.

M: So people came to see what we were doing?

F: Well, they were the people who were just at the museum. And then they saw this,what we were doing and it looked interesting so they just ran behind us, and I didn't paythem any mind because I had caught on that we were going to be interesting to look at.

M: Wherever we went.

F: Uh-huh. They didn't seem to be hostile so.

M: Did the staring start on the boat?3

F: I don't think so. When we started going around. Then it started. But it wasn't as badin France as it was in Italy.

M: To me I experienced the trip as very enjoyable because of this staring. I mean it waslike a constant party. People were buying us things and feeding us.

F: But it wasn't an unpleasant staring. They had smiles on their faces, and when theyfind out you want glace, then that's exactly what they are going to get you. And thenthey are going to appear with the ice cream because they don't speak the language,and then the kids are going to look at you like can we have it, and all the crowd is going

to do this (nodding head), and that's it.

M: And of course, there were no punishments or unpleasant moments becauseeverybody was looking at us.

F: There was nothing to punish about. First of all, you all were well behaved children.You just were making it a point that you wanted glace.

M: How did we make that point?

F: You said, I want glace. I want to go outside with the man.

M: I want ice cream and I don't want to look at these pictures.

F: We don't have to see that today.

M: We could see it tomorrow, because every day that we were in Europe, we went to amuseum.

F: The code when you're traveling is never put off till tomorrow something you can dotoday.

M: That's your code Faith. We were children on our first trip to Europe. We didn't havea code.

F: You don't want one day to pass without doing something memorable. As it turnedout, you know what happened. We were going to come back to Paris but we couldn'tbecause Uncle Andrew died. 4

M: So was Momma Jones with us in the Louvre?

F: She was but she was acting like she wasn't with us.

M: Oh, she was embarrassed.

F: She was embarrassed.

M: Was she embarrassed a lot by the way we behaved?

F: No, but she was very embarrassed by the Louvre.

M: Because?

F: Because you were being followed.

M: Well, was it a good or a bad thing in her view that we were being followed?

F: It was not a good thing.

M: Why was it not a good thing.

F: She didn't like the idea that we were being followed.

M: By these white people.

F: Yeah, by these white people!

M: That was a bad sign.

F: That was not a good sign. She had no idea what they thought. Did they think that thechildren were ill-mannered or misbehaved or what did they think? Why did we have tohave a group of people following us? She did not like it at all. She said, "you all just goahead. It's okay. You just keep going. Don't mind me." She didn't like a whole bunch ofattention.

M: But you had a goal and it was to get to the "Mona Lisa."

F: I had a goal to find the "Mona Lisa." And as I said it was not easy to find it. But finallyI did find it. And then when we found it, we didn't dance but that's what gave me theidea for "Dancing at the Louvre."

M: To celebrate having found the "Mona Lisa." Figure 127--Leonardo da Vinci, "MonaLisa."

F: Right. Because part of the problem that we had was that when people go to Europeright away they start to try to establish some form of European culture becauseEuropean culture was superior, or was thought of as being superior to Americanculture. Now that's tricky if you are black because we are not Europeans. So thereforeit occured to me that we shouldn't do that. We shouldn't get confused about thesuperiority of European culture. That is not a good idea to implant in your mind, andI've seen so many black people who go abroad and do that.

M: How do they do that?

F: Well, because they have to have the wine.

M: They get totally French or totally European.

F: Yes, and then they have--like that guy Ted Joans (Afro-American artist) said to mebefore we went in the restaurant in Paris, "okay now don't get in here and start yellingand screaming." That's a perfect example of somebody who has a warped notion of thesuperiority of western culture and the inferiority of black american culture. How darehim. And you know it took me a little while to figure out what he was talking about. Oh, Isee. All these years he's been in Europe. He's not use to it yet. He still has to try topretend that he belongs here. I don't need to belong here. I just need to be able tocome here, see what I want to see, and go home.

M: I just recently re-read The Fire Next Time, which was written at the same time byJames Baldwin who lived a lot in France and it seems to me one of the things he issuffering from is a kind of assumption that black people have been so incrediblydevastated and disenfranchised, particularly in comparison to Europeans, we are in asense the bastards of the West in the sense that Europe has all the beautiful wonderfulculture, and the beautiful and wonderful accomplishments and we are like brutes.

F: What did he mean by we?

M: He means black Americans. White Americans are brutes as well. But we areparticularly brutalized because of the way we've been treated by slavery. Rememberthe black cultural arts movement has not occured yet. And Baldwin in particular is veryunfamiliar with the cultural accomplishments of black people under slavery andthroughout the black diaspora. He's been living in France a long time and he is a victimof a lot of the scholarship that blacks were doing at the time, like E. Franklin Frazier inThe Black Bourgeoisie.

F: So there was no acceptance of African culture?

M: Or how about African American culture? It is not that he was ignorant Faith. Afterall,he lived in France so he knew Africans. He probably knew, for instance, MariamMekeba or Hugh Masekela but he's not putting it together in his head. I don't think hereally in his heart believed that we were the same people with the Africans. Andremember, it was African Americans who thought of themselves as Africans. Africansdidn't think of themselves as African but Ghanian or Ibo. So this concept of beingAfrican is a relatively recent concept and it does not date from 1961 when this scenarioin the Louvre is taking place. "Dancing" is the only scenario like this in the FrenchCollection. It is very important I think for a number of reasons. It is going on in France.It is going on in the MusÈe du Louvre, which is I think, a former palace of some kind. Itis a great world historical collection of art. And the painter you focused upon, Leonardoda Vinci is one of the first master's of the Italian Renaissance. And so you've gonebeyond the glory of France to the glory of Italy, which stems from the glory of theRoman Empire back to the Greeks and so forth. This is in some ways encapsulatingthe greatest heritage in Western culture. I think it is interesting that you picked thispainting, and you picked this painter and you picked this room in the Louvre. Why notthe Uffizi? Why not -- were there other paintings that you saw on the way in the Louvreto this painting that particularly struck you?

F: Well, you mentioned the children. I hadn't thought about it but I always lovedpaintings that had children in them. And all three of these do typify women andchildren. In fact, there are no male images here.

M: And that is itself kind of unusual in that da Vinci only did a pretty small number ofpaintings, right?

F: Is that true?

M: He only has very few paintings. That's the thing that is so great about him. Only afew of his works survived and they are all considered masterpieces.

F: As far as the French Collection is concerned, the whole idea that black people don'thave the cultural authority of the West. I just wanted to play with that. Because I think itis all just a big joke. And I don't want to play that game. Because I think people shoulddo what they do. That's not what's wrong with us. That we would dance at the Louvre.That is not it. It's a whole other thing. That these people would not dance at the Louvrehas nothing to do with it. They are not dancing at the Louvre because they can't dance.That's the reason they don't dance at the Louvre.

M: Hello. That's a good point.

F: They can't dance. If they could dance, they too would be dancing at the Louvre.

M: That's why we dance everywhere because we can dance.

F: People do what they can do. That's why they painted. Because they could paint.

M: And that's why we dance.

F: And that's why we dance because we can. And one's not better than the other.Culture is what you did to get over. What did you do in your life? What did you eat?What did you wear? Where did you live? how did you live? What was your music, yoursinging, your food, your cuisine? All of these things are expressive of what you neededto live. And that's why your culture is so important. And it is not right and it is not wrong.Nobody's culture is right and nobody's culture is wrong. All of it has to do with thethings you put together to make your people grow, and live and flourish. I just wantedto do a painting that would show the difference in those two things, and its okay forthese kids to dance. Of course Willia Marie is upset.

M: She's a little embarrassed . . .

F: She's a lot.

M: So she's in Momma Jones's role of being embarrassed.

F: That's right. She really doesn't think it is appropriate to do this. The kids could careless.

M: So in a way in this painting, even though this is Momma Jones, the relationship ofthe first scene of "Dancing in the Louvre" to our family would be more one in whichWillia Maria would be Momma Jones and the other woman would be you, and thesethree children would be Barbara and I.

F: Yes, it is very complex but it is that kind of thing. The roles move around. They don'tstay static. I am just using their imagery. But I never could get these particular children,my grandchildren to pose for me.

M: You couldn't?

F: Could not.

M: Did you try?

F: They didn't understand what I was doing.

M: So tell me because you know Barbara and I did pose for you. Right?

F: Well, I am sure you did. But I had control over that situation. I didn't have controlover this.

M: But you use to ask them to pose? I didn't know that.

F: I said, you know, I am doing this painting of you all. It was on the wall in the studio.

M: It was this particular painting?

F: Yeah, it was on the wall in the studio. I had started it in Paris. I started it in Pariswithout them and I worked on it in the South of France in La Napoule and then Ibrought it home to that studio I had on 38th Street. And I was finishing it and I wantedto get better likenesses of them but I could never get all three of them, or even one ortwo. Finally, I did get Faith kind of.

M: What did she do? Did she sit still and pose for you?

F: Well, for a little bit. But basically there was not an understanding of what it was I wastrying to do. They had no idea this picture was going to be around forever. They'll bedead. I'll be dead. This painting, I hope, will still be there. And I know they haveencountered it many times since 1991 when it was finished, and have been surprisedto see it. It's been reproduced in different places. So they didn't know that.

M: They never got to go to the Louvre with the family.

F: No.

M: But Barbara and I we had a concept of what a painting was.

F: But you didn't want to see the "Mona Lisa" either. Not until the next year when the"Mona Lisa" came to America. We never discussed it anymore after that. And Barbaradid a talk for her class. In fact, Barbara did the lecture when they went to theMetropolitan to see the "Mona Lisa." Barbara is the one who told them, it is really quitesmaller than you are going to imagine, and at the Louvre, it wasn't behind velvet ropesand so forth. I think someone had tried to desecrate it. But anyway this painting wasseparated from the public here. And now when you go there (to the Louvre), it is in abig glass box.

M: I think this may have been the beginning of the big blockbuster shows in themuseums with people lined up down the block to get in.

F: Yeah, because when we got to the "Mona Lisa" in 1961 it was just sitting there likehey, so what.

M: But in regard to this painting, it is also a painting and a scene in which it is womenand children, which is kind of interesting maybe? Is that important? Particularly giventhat the Western master whose work is being held up as a pinnacle of WesternCivilization is a male, Leonardo da Vinci from the 16th century. But it is all women andchildren. Is this saying something about the relationship of women and children, ormothers and daughters to Western culture?

F: It is saying something about my determination to have the freedom to express thepeople I want.

M: As a woman and as a mother.

F: To not suddenly feel like if I want to show the power of Western culture, or African-American culture, I have to revert right away to male images and white people. I don'thave to do any of that. I can use my family. I can use children who are on the bottom ofthe scale. I can use black women. I can do what I want. And I can also paint Leonardo

da Vinci's pictures. Why not?

M: Part of how you got to do the French Collection was that the National Endowment ofthe Arts gave you some money to paint in La Napoule in the South of France. As an artstudent you had learned to copy the masters. And that process was a theme in yourcomposition of "Dancing at the Louvre."

F: I was talking about copying the European masters. That's the way they taught usback then. When I was a little girl we use to copy etchings out of our history books.There was a lot of copying going on.

M: Copying and reciting. I guess they both go together.

F: Oh right. I don't recall ever being encouraged to write poetry. But to remember it andrecite it, yes. Then when I got to college, the general feeling was that you couldn't becreative and interesting as an artist. The only thing you could really do is copysomebody else's ideas. Furthermore, these masters' paintings were considered sogreat that you could never ever do anything great enough to call it art, actually.

M: Did they grade you on the copies?

F: Yeah, it was how well you could. That was very important. They taught uscomposition. They taught us a lot of technical skills that we don't teach art studentstoday. So we understood how these people composed pictures. We understoodcomposition very well. I think this business of copying has its good and bad side.

M: I was going to ask you if you thought there were any advantages or disadvantagesto it.

F: I think that I wouldn't teach that way today. I think that it is very bad in that you don'tknow who you are. So that when I graduated, it took me a long time to find my ownstyle.

M: And when you graduated, it was close to the time that you went to Europe with thefamily to tour the old masters.

F: That's why I went there because I thought of them as being the essence of art. Theyare the ones you look at if you are going to be a painter. If you want to be a sculptor,you look at African sculpture. If you are going to be a painter, you look at Europeanpainting. So anyway I just wanted to go there and walk down the streets and go tothose museums and see the different works that I had copied to see if I really wanted tobecome an artist. Which I don't know how that experience could help.

M: Oh you don't? Now you think it was rediculous.

F: Walking down the street had nothing to do with it.

M: It didn't?

F: How? That Picasso lived in Paris and I had seen his work in its original form hasnothing to do with me coming back to America and becoming an artist.

M: So was it a frivolous notion to go to Paris and think that this would infuse you with aclarity about what kind of artist you would be. On the other hand, you did give WilliaMarie that scenario. And she is successful with it.

F: Yes, but I give her more of an understanding of who she is to go with it. So she hasa better shot than I did. I had no idea what I was doing. And if I had known, I probablywould not have been an artist.

M: Why does she have a better understanding?

F: Because I bring all of her culture over there to her. And I give her the knowledgethrough the different texts I write for her. She's a composite. She has a lot of successwith the French. And she is going to stay in France. She is not going to come back toAmerica where she can't possibly get anywhere. She does not have to struggle.Struggle is a problem she does not have to deal with. She has a much better situationthan any African American woman ever had actually.

M: Okay, "Wedding on the Seine." This is a very interesting painting because obviouslyone of the things you wanted to show was composition. You wanted to emphasize themateriality of Paris, the Seine River, the architecture of Paris, the way it is constructed.Although the theme of the story is focused on Willia Marie who is a little bit anxiousabout getting married since it is so much in conflict with being an artist, she is verysmall in the picture and her bouquet is going over the side. I am just curious about theproportions of the figure in relationship to the setting.

F: When you put a person out against a bridge, which earlier I had done during thebridge series in 1988, so I know something about putting people on bridges. I didn'twant her flying. Because the "Women on a Bridge" Series in 88 were flying. This is 90. Ihad just completed the book Tar Beach in which I had really gotten into bridges so Iknew what I was doing when I made her. She is about as big as she should be. In fact,she is bigger than she should be.

M: In proportion to the city?

F: Right, I mean if you want to look at it photographically. I mean none of this isphotographic. This is compositional work really based on my understanding ofcomposition drawn from all those years of copying the masters. I do what I want to dowith the elements in my composition.

M: Why so much of the water? Why so much of the city? Why so much of Paris and solittle of her?

F: Because I am trying to show you the bigness and beauty of Paris against this littleblack girl throwing her bouquet in the water. I want you to see her but I want you tounderstand how small she is compared to everything else.

M: She is dwarfed by the city. Is it the largeness of the city? The beauty of the city?

F: The history.

M: The history of the city.

F: Everything about that city that is going to go right on.

M: But is it good or bad? Is it a villian or?

F: It can be very good. It all depends on how well she uses it. I wanted to kind of makeall the people from the wedding running behind her trying to bring her back but then Isaid, no, don't do that. That will confuse the image. . .

M: Also, it is understood anybody who is all dressed up in their wedding gown runningand throwing their bouquet is obviously being followed by some other people in thedistance.

F: I went to the Seine.

M: To Pont Neuf. (Figure 128--Pont Neuf, Paris).

F: I went to the bridge that is next to Pont Neuf and looked over at it and I don't knowhow many times I did that trying to get my composition right.

M: Is this supposed to be the right bank or the left bank?

F: This is the Left Bank because Notre Dame cathedral is right there. So I worked veryhard trying to get the feeling of having to deal with this dilemma of all this Frenchtradition.

M: So she was in conflict about marrying him from the very beginning?

F: Yes, but women do that just when they are about to achieve success or findthemselves, they get married. And then of course that holds things back in most cases.

M: But in her case?

F: He dies.

M: Which is completely copasetic.

F: Yeah, it worked out alright. Plus he was going to take over the story. He was goingto become too much involved. I needed him to not be around. He left and the childrencame to be raised by Aunt Melissa in America. And she was just there, dealing withsome of the issues women have in achieving their goals. If young girls don't see anypossibility of any kind of future or career, they can only find hope in being mothers.That is potentially a very difficult situation. I think it works maybe for some women. Ithink it works maybe for a lot of women. But I think it also doesn't work for another largegroup of women who can dream.

M: Do you like to paint cities?

F: Yes, I do.

M: Because the only cities you paint are Paris and New York.

F: Well you don't want to paint just any old city. You know its like who wants to paintSan Diego.

M: No?

F: No you don't want to paint that. That's like one of my students said, oh it's sobeautiful, the landscape is so beautiful. Yeah, but you don't want to paint it. He neverthought of it. He hasn't painted it. Some landscapes are gorgeous and you want topaint them but some landscapes are gorgeous but you don't want to paint them.

M: Like maybe Russell Simmons' garden is beautiful but you don't want to paint it.5

F: Well, I think there are patches of that that you can paint. In fact, there was a youngwoman who was drawing some parts of the garden. I think you could get something outof that. But I think it is also very what did Teddy call it, very fake?6 But there are partsof it that are magnificent. Small patches of leaves and plants and things that were justwonderful. A garden is a funny kind of thing. You have to look at it in pieces and thenyou have to look at it as a whole.

M: In the "Picnic at Giverny."

F: You see I am not aware that I am making gardens here.

M: First, of all you better tell me about Giverny. I know it is where Monet painted. But itmust have been a garden, right?

F: It's Monet's garden. He created that garden.

M: He lived there and there's Monet's house. Is it historically reconstructed?

F: No it is not reconstructed. It is the way it was.

M: But is it the way it was when he was alive?

F: Well, they are trying to keep it as faithful as possible. It's European. It's magnificent.

M: I mean the house. You didn't show the house. You show the garden.

F: The house is non-descript, like a lot of European houses.

M: Very plain?

F: Yeah.

M: Is it sort of a shack or a cabin?

F: I can't remember the architecture of it. It's rustic. And inside, there are carpets andall of that. They didn't want the artists who were there with fellowships.

M: Oh, really, they have a fellowship? So this is to some degree where you got the ideafor your own garden, garden parties and the Anyone Can Fly Foundation givingfellowships.7

F: Yes, but way in the back of my head. If you had asked me do I love gardens, I would

have said yeah but. It was not something that I really knew I loved and wanted. Younever heard me say I wanted a garden because maybe I never thought I would haveone so why want one.

M: But in any case, at Giverny, there is Monet's house. The house has fellowships forartists to come and work there.

F: There's a program. When I was on the board at the CAA (the College ArtAssociation), the Monet foundation managed to get the CAA to be the committee thatvoted for the artists who got the grants. I was on that committee. That's how I got to gothere.

M: You mean you were chosen.

F: No, I was one of the people who chose other people.

M: And with the people who were chosen, is it like the McDowell Colony? You live thereand work there.

F: Right.

M: But inside the house or outside the house?

F: See that was what I was asking. Do you want these people to be inside the house orpeople who paint outdoors? They assured us that the answer was no. That theywanted people who do whatever they do.

M: But could they stay in the house?

F: They were not very comfortable in that house.

M: That house was uncomfortable.

F: That house was made to be uncomfortable by the people who were doing it.

M: They couldn't care less whether anybody was going to be comfortable in that house.

F: See I don't know. The French have a different sensibility. They don't want you inthere because you are going to be messing with the decor. It's like if somebody wasupstairs in my studio long after I am dead trying to paint up there. They are not going totake care of those floors like I do. They are going to mess up stuff. And so, what someof the artists told me is if they put up something on the wall, when they came back thenext day, it was taken down.

M: You mean to tell me they invite the artists to come and work in the space and thenthey try to take their stuff off the wall?

F: They don't try to. They do. Because artists have different styles of working. BecauseI think Monet had those oriental rugs leading up to the studio. Some of them had verylavish studios and people are not going to take care of that so why not just say the arthas to be created outside? You may not affix anything to the walls. You may not paintindoors. You may not do x, y and z. Say it and get it over with.

M: But they let them live there.

F: Yeah, but they gave them a car and encouraged them to go to Paris.

M: Did they have beds to sleep in?

F: Yes, but you don't sleep where you work.

M: Did they have any place for these people to sleep?

F: You sleep one place and you work someplace else.

M: Where was the sleeping place?

F: Well, I don't know where the sleeping place was. I know in La Napoule, we slept inthe Maid's Quarters.

M: You had a castle there. Monet's house is not a castle.

F: Yeah but it was pretty big. There were a lot of accomodations.

M: Was he rich?

F: Monet? Of course. How was he going to have this great big garden like this and notbe rich.

M: How big was the garden?

F: It was huge. He had a lake that was about as big as my whole garden.

M: I've seen some of it and I've seen photographs.

F: It is the kind of garden you stroll.

M: It is like Russell's place, ten acres? So the house is commensurately large? Figure129--Russell Simmons' Garden, East Hampton.

F: I wouldn't say that the house is as big but the garden is. I would say that thedifference is that Monet had rows and rows and rows of flowers, just gorgeous flowers.Seas of florals. Why they wouldn't encourage people who paint flowers to be there, Idon't know . . .

M: So they are very mixed up and confused as to how they want to honor Monet'slegacy at Giverny.

F: Well, They don't want to cripple the artist. They don't want to say you have to x, yand z.

M: But on the other hand, you do have to do x, y and z.

F: You certainly do. Because first of all, you may not be comfortable if you go there,and you try to paint up in Monet's studio. Now he had one big studio that nobody wasin. The upstairs studio was where they crowded everybody in. All the people had to be

in that one spot.

M: They were not nice to them.

F: You know, the French have that way. They are not being not nice. They are justbeing French. They are just being who they are. But actually I think the foundation isowned by Americans, and so is La Napoule. It's Americans that owned it but theFrench are managing it, taking care of it and manipulating it to some extent in bothcases. And they also have to deal with the French community around these places.

M: This is fascinating because this is a case of an estate and a foundation handling thematerial legacy of a very famous artist. You wouldn't find this in the U.S.

F: Why?

M: I don't know. But you can't go up to Winslow Homer's studio on Rhode Island whereit was and do anything.

F: But you can go to Pollock's studio.

M: That's Pollock. Winslow Homer was Monet's contemporary. He had a studio. Hewas a very successful artist. I bet you cannot go to his studio or his house and doanything there. You would be lucky if you could go look at it. It's very interesting, andthere were a lot of artists in the U.S. who were rich and successful but I think that thisconcept you have of a foundation and continuing the legacy is probably more Europeanthan American. You can probably go to their houses and look and leave.

F: Why don't you research this more. It is an interesting subject. Jake (JacobLawrence) has no house. He gave up his house and moved into an appartment. Howabout Andy Warhol?

M: There's a museum.

F: Yeah, but that's not the foundation. That's some other people. The foundation's goalis to get rid of the work. They are going to sell it and make programs. And some otherpeople have the Andy Warhol museum. Also, Monet has a museum that is dedicatedjust to him. L'Orangerie. It's a round museum and it shows those paintings of hisgarden. He devoted a lot of the latter part of his life to painting his gorgeous garden.

M: We are looking at Giverny in "Picnic at Giverny." You did not choose to devote thispanel to the garden or to the house but rather to showing Willa Marie in the process ofpainting a group portrait of a group of people who had played a pivotal role in yourcareer. This is also a tribute to the Manet painting "Picnic on the Grass" with nudewomen and the dressed men. So its a picnic, it is Giverny which is Monet's place, and itis Picasso with no clothes on and a hat.

F: And it also shows Willa painting in her white dress.

M: Why did you combine so many different elements? Why didn't you paint Monet inthe nude?

F: I just didn't think he would be as interesting.

M: Or as recognizable.

F: Yeah, Picasso is such a womanizer. He would be the perfect one to take off hisclothes with all my feminist friends sitting there because I wanted Willia to know aboutwomen's role in art. Because that would be something that if she didn't know about it,her art would be negatively effected.

M: So this is Ofelia Garcia and Johnetta Cole. Why are these two women placedamong your feminist friends?

F: When my mother died, Ofelia was the president of WCA (Women's Caucus on Art aspart of the CAA) and she appointed me vice-president at a time when I really needed toget involved and have supportive people around me. And she helped me in my project,which was to get more diversity in the WCA. She is the Dean of the School of Art atWilliam Patterson. She is also Cuban.

M: I know Johnetta Cole but I don't know why she is in this painting.

F: I met Johnetta when I went to Spelman. I was in Atlanta at the High Museum andspoke to Johnetta and I was telling her about my plans for the French Collection. She isthe one who suggested the name Willia. She was extremely supportive and I reallyliked her. Then you have Moira. As you know, Moira and I have been comrades since Imet her in the late 70s. She got me my professorship at UCSD. She's written about meextensively as an art critic, and we've travelled extensively together. We are greatfriends. I have so many best friends.

M: Is Ellie one of your best friends?

F: Ellie curated my first travelling show and I didn't even know who she was. She hadresearched me thoroughly and just appeared at Bernice's gallery with the idea of doingthis travelling show.8 I was very impressed and it was so well done. And then shewhipped around and bought one of the paintings.

M: Now we come to Lowery and I wanted to hear from you why she was included inthis picture.

F: I met Lowery in 1973 when I had my first retrospective at the Zimmerly Museum atRutgers and she came to the opening. We had a bus that met us downtownsomewhere and they took us out to Rutgers. She was I think working for theMetropolitan in the education department. She later became curator. She was just sowarm and so sweet. She bought a painting.

M: But has Lowery done anything for you since she bought that painting in 1973.

F: She got the Metropolitan to buy the "Street Story Quilt." There was a lot I could havesaid about Lowery yesterday (had given her a Rush foundation Award at Simmons'house in East Hampton) but I wasn't talking to an audience of people who cared. Theydidn't even know who she was. Plus they only gave me a minute. If they had given memore time, I could make them know who she is. Furthermore Queen Latifah introducedher and gave her credentials as a man, and then had to be corrected that she was awoman. Then she said, Faith Ringgold will present her with the award. But they neversaid anything about who I was. I knew that wasn't going to happen because how can

you do that. You understand what I am saying?

M: Queen Latifah should have introduced you and you should have introduced Lowery.

F: Right. But somehow or other they didn't want me to introduce Lowery.

M: And they didn't want to introduce you.

F. They didn't introduce me. But I didn't get involved. I just went with it.

M: They should not have picked Latifah as the mc.

F: They made the right choice. Those people are hip hop and they saved the honoreesfor the last. It was 10 o'clock. It was absolutely the last thing that happened.

M: Now, Judith Leiber.

F: Judith Leiber bought "Tar Beach" and got me in the Guggenheim Collection. Judithis the one who did the following: a) she donated that painting to the GuggenheimMuseum, and b) raised sufficient amounts of money so that the Street Story Quilt couldbe bought by the Metropolitan.

M: Was she on the Board of the Metropolitan.

F: Yes. Part of the reason why Lowery got involved was because Judith Leiber made alimited edition of a pocketbook with the Street Story image on it and sold it to a lot ofwomen. I know for one thing Oprah bought two and several other women did. This wasdone to raise money. She charged $7000 for each. And that money was used withother money to purchase Street Story for the Metropolitan.

M: When did this happen?

F: 1988.

M: Okay, Faith, let's go on to Thalia Gouma Peterson.

F: Thalia gave me a beautiful show at the Wooster Museum, a really beautiful showand she also gave me a catalogue. She also writes about me.

M: How about Emma?

F: Emma, I can't think of anything Emma did. She is just an artist. And I always try toinclude some black artists.

M: Were you still with Bernice at this time?

F: Yes, Bernice played a pivotal role in my career.

M: How about Michele Wallace.

F: Oh, well, she's my daughter.

M: Why was it important that you paint portraits of your supporters?

F: It is nice to pay back. I think a lot of people don't do that. And it turns me off. I reallylike to do it. And a lot of people have told me how much they appreciate beingrecognized.

M: Is there anything else you would like to say about this picture?

F: I went there of course, needless to say. Did a lot of drawing. I got the composition.You see, the composition is always very important. I knew it was going to be Monet buthow will you express it? How will you show Monet's garden? And being there on thescene I put it together, and then I went back to my house in La Napoule and createdthis composition and began painting and really liked what I did. I was trying to put thewomen in a garden.

M: The "Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles."

F: I am making compositions. You can't get away from that.

M: From looking at the Louvre Collection book you had, you can see that thearrangements of figures is very important in your work as well. As a matter fact, DaVinci, one of the things he is famous for is the "Last Supper." It is a group, yet it iscomposed in such a way that there are various competing circuits of interest with Christin the center alone, and he is just at that moment when he is saying, one of you willbetray me and everybody goes back to that painting. One of the contributions of theRenaissance is this notion of geometrical space in compositions. Figure 130--Leonardoda Vinci, "The Last Supper"

"The Last Supper" is even more famous because it was not made in such a way that itcould survive without difficulty, so they are constantly trying to save it, and repair it, andreconstruct it and so on. Now that they've repaired it, people say well that's not the wayit was. And then of course a million people have gone back and reprised thatcomposition. Everything from the "Dinner Party" of Judy Chicago, Marisol, Warhol,everybody has done more of those compositions. So having said that, we look at yourquilting bee. This is not of living supporters but of the dead ancestors-- except the onlyperson living in this picture is Rosa Parks. But everybody else is an ancestor gatheredquilting the sunflower quilt in a field of sunflowers. They are quilting sunflowers on aquilt. On the right is Van Gogh standing there with a bushel of sunflowers?

F: No he is holding his vase of sunflowers, his famous vase of sunflowers. Don't youknow that? What's wrong with you?

M: I know what the painting looks like but I don't know what he's doing here. Figure131--Vincent Van Gogh, Sunflowers.

F: He's holding a vase of sunflowers. Doesn't it look like it?

M: So, is this your "Last Supper?"

F: No, I think that . . .

M: They were all betrayed?

F: Well sort of quasi in a sense. Needless to say I went to Arles and I sat in the square.

M: There isn't a house.

F: Yes there is. I sat in the square. The houses are over there. Part of composition ishaving the courage to do it and to see it and to change what you see so that you cando it. So I went there and sat in a cafe and put that composition together. But part ofthe reason for putting those women in this composition has to do with the discussion Ihad with Oprah Winfrey in which she was talking about her role models. She mentionedall of these women as role models and I had proposed to do this painting for her. Thecommission broke down at some point. It never happened but I liked the idea. And youknow, I like ideas. So I put this painting together. Of course I added Van Gogh.

M: You added Van Gogh, and Arles and sunflowers.

F: So it wasn't just straight role models. It was on the cover of the opening invitation forthe show at Bernice's gallery and Oprah bought it from the invitation so she owns this.She bought it and hadn't even seen it.

M: Too bad she is so stubborn about not lending it out.

F: Yes.

M: One of the thing that makes this painting so powerful is the combinations of theseblack women with the sunflowers and Van Gogh. Part of it is the legend of the kind ofartist Van Gogh was, as an artist who was consumed by his own talent, who was neverrecognized in his own time but who today is considered very successful and whosework is sold for exorbitant amounts at auctions. In fact, in a way Van Gogh is like thebad conscience of the art world because they celebrated him but not during his ownlifetime when he might have benefited from the attention. And then of course there arethese sunflowers, which this painting has contributed to making them iconographic.This painting is part of the reason why there is so much sunflower stuff all over theplace, don't you think? People are very, very insane about these sunflowers.

F: They look like little black people.

M: See, I don't know why but I always think of sunflowers as being very African andtropical. Are they?

F: They are like people. If you see a field of sunflowers it just looks like a whole lot ofpeople with brown faces standing there. And they are very big and tall. They havethese big heads. And then they have big green leaves. But they are just like people andthey will turn their heads, you know. Yeah, they can turn their heads according to theway the sun is.

M: Really?

F: Sun flowers! Sun flowers! There is some confusion about what they do, whether theyturn to face the sun or turn away from the sun.

M: So they are like little brown people.

F: I was trying to figure out why did Van Gogh love sunflowers. He was strange in manyways. And they were as strange. You see I wanted to say that the whole idea of

blackness, Europe, France, painting is not exclusive from being able to understandpeople from other places. There is one story and it can be told at the same time andtogether. And I think a lot of people may not be aware of that and I would like to makethem aware of that.

M: Okay, now in regard to these sunflowers at Arles. Are there sunflowers all over theSouth of France or do you just have to go to Arles to see these sunflowers?

F: No, they have them in other places. And I was running all over trying to find them. Inever saw them in Arles. I finally saw them near Giverny.

M: And it was a field.

F: Yes. See you have to watch out. It has to be a certain time of the year, and you'vegot to find them in certain places. So you can go by them and they can all be dead.

M: But also it is a crop.

F: Yes, sunflower seeds and sunflower oil.

M: So when you saw large numbers of them, someone was raising them as a crop. Soit is like a crop, like cotton.

F: I have this wonderful book of sunflowers. I bought it in France.9

M: Well I would like to see it.

F: So you know that's the first thing I do when I am painting a picture. I just try to get asmany books as possible.

M: Do you think that Van Gogh's madness contributed to his painting?

F: Madness contributed to his painting. Hum. I don't think you have to be mad to begreat. I think he was mad and he was great. I don't know that they contribute to eachother. I think that he was great and that he was ignored, which could make him mad.

M: Do you think any of these women were mad?

F: I think they were all driven, not necessarily driven mad but they were very much intotheir goals. In other words, they all had the greatness of him. They were great people.

M: Well, you certainly picked them well.

F: Now if you wanted to do a group of white women like that, who would you pick?

M: I would have to think about it. But I could find some.

F: It is amazing that you would have so many black ones and there's more.

M: Cady Stanton, Mother Jones, Simone de Beauvoir, Eleanor Roosevelt. I think thatEmily Dickinson, Virginia Wolfe and Flannery O'Connor were all kind of wonderful. Butit's great that your women are quilting.

F: Yes, because it is our one visual art that we manage to continue without interruption.

M: Now "Matisse's Model." Willa Marie is reclining on a chaise. Matisse looks reallyblack and white.

F: No, he is not in color.

M: He's not. Because.

F: I wanted to set him apart from the design that I was using and the people and her. Idon't know. It's just a technique I used to make him stand out.

M: Matisse and Picasso are the two artists who you continually refer to in the FrenchCollection.

F: And you know they were very close to each other, also competitive with each other.

M: But very different.

F: Isn't that funny? They are alike but they are very very different.

M: I bet Matisse was not as much of a lady's man as Picasso.

F: No. I don't think so.

M: He also lived a really long time. They both lived into their 90s. So they are great rolemodels as artists. So how does she feel laying up there naked.

F: I think it is really all about the image of blackness. It has to do with image.

M: I have written that the paintings in the French Collection fall into three categories:the first is group portraits, reclining figures, and family scenes. "Matisse's Model,""Picasso's Studio" and "Jo Baker's birthday" are all reclining nudes.

F: (In a little girl voice) That's what the children say. All your pictures are naked. I wantto take them to school to show to the other children but they don't got no clothes on.

M: But they are not naked in a very ostentatious way.

F: No, they're nice.

M: Alright. Here we are at "Matisse's Chapel." How many Matisse paintings do wehave? Just two? "Moroccan Holiday" doesn't have anything to do with Matisse?

F: Yes it does.

M: What?

F: It is a place where he went.

M: Okay, so that's three.

F: But I don't know that I used any of his imagery there.

M: But this is Matisse's chapel.

F: Yeah, well I went there too. I went to Matisse's chapel in Vence. I was trying to getthere and they wouldn't open the doors. And so I figured it out that I would just have togo to mass. It was the only way I could get in there. And I was able then to be there. Iheard the singing.

M: So you got to see it during mass. Has that got something to do with the resultingimage?

F: Of course. I wanted to be in the space. I had seen lots of pictures of Matisse'schapel but that's not like being there in the place.

M: But did that contribute to your putting a lot of people in the chapel?

F: It contributed to my understanding that it was a funerary chapel.

M: It's a funerary chapel?

F: That's what I call it because it doesn't have any red in it.

M: Was there a funeral going on?

F: No.

M: Mass is kind of funereal.

F: It was funerary in that it was one of the last things that Matisse did just before hedied. It is kind of a tribute to his death. It was one of the things he did at the very end ofhis life, kind of a dedication to life in death just before he died.

M: And so, in other words, you set a funereal tone in this painting?

F: Uh-hum. By bringing all my people back.

M: So you knew that this seems like a funeral.

F: Uh-hum.

M: No red. Is that why?

F: As far as I'm concerned.

M: But when you talk about in the story what happens is that Willa Marie dreams thather great grandmother comes back.

F: All of them are back.

M: They are all back to talk about slavery.

F: The story they never heard.

M: But there is nothing about that situation that suggests that anybody is having a

funeral.

F: No.

M: So why is it funereal?

F: The funerary part is the fact that these are people all dead.

M: Yes but even people who look at this painting . . . I would want to argue that ifpeople looked at the painting and didn't know anything about these people, whetherthey were alive or dead, they would still know that this is a funeral.

F: Well, look at the way they are dressed.

M: These people were dressed for a wedding. Are you saying that weddings andfunerals are similar?

F: Yes. There's something that is very close about them. Some people cry at weddingsjust like they are funerals. In a painting, you have to look for clues of composition, notonly placement composition but color composition. What colors will be evident here.There was no red in the chapel so I wasn't going to make any red on my people, andthat was making a hell of a statement. No red meant to me funerary. And then I foundthese photographs of Ralph sitting in my mother's lap very much like baby Jesus sittingon Mary's lap.10 So all these things came together.

M: Actually the Christian church is one big funeral because it is about Christ's death onthe cross so regardless whether it is a wedding a birth or a funeral, anything in thechurch is funereal in our Christian tradition.

F: If it's death, if it's a ceremony and its a family then its death. It's not a church service.It's a funeral.

M: The most upbeat thing in Christianity is Easter when Christ was reborn andresurrected. And then the birth of Christ, and he had to get born in a stable with theanimals.

F: He couldn't even find a place to get born.

M: The reason why he was born in a stable is because the people lived in houses inwhich there were stables. The animals were on the first floor and the people livedupstairs. They got the heat from the animals. What happened in Christ's case is thatupstairs where people stayed they didn't have any room so they put them down in themanger with the animals. They were use to living in the same structure with theanimals.

F: I wanted that slave story because we never knew what happened because theywouldn't share that.

M: What do you think about the fact that they wouldn't share.

F: Because if you don't tell anybody about what happened, it didn't happen and that'swhat they wanted.

M: And everybody does that after a genocide.

F: Let's don't keep this going. Let's don't talk about it.

M: These are all of Momma Jones' siblings.

F: And I put my father's mother and father in there too. I made them up.

M: Baby Doll Hurd and Rev. Jones. They are separate from Momma Jone's siblings.

M: I wonder where all the Jones people are. Baby Doll was not your father's mother?She was a second wife.

F: No. But in reality his mother divorced his father and married another woman. BabyDoll had another husband.

M: So you knew Baby Doll.

F: Oh yes.

M: She use to come to visit.

F: Yes, she came twice.

M: She had another husband. I guess his name was Hurd.

F: Right.

M: So what happened to him. Reverend Jones.

F: He was gone on somewhere else. Preaching.

M: He was a preacher? Did he get married again?

F: Maybe.

M: He didn't stay in touch.

F: No. I never saw him. One of his nephew's came to town and we treated him so badlythat he never came back. We were not . . .

M: Welcoming of the Jones clan.

F: No.

M: Why? Maybe because your father's father had left your family. So you preferred herto this other man. What can you tell me about her?

F: She came to visit and she would get up early in the morning at the crack of dawnand try to get us up to go out and get fresh eggs and stuff. We were like, what? Dowhat, grandma?

M: (Laughing)

F: We need to get some milk and eggs for breakfast. It was wild.

M: What did you say? Do what grandma? (Laughing)

F: She wanted us to get up!

M: So you did have a grandma you remember. I guess you needed to go out in thebarn and collect those eggs.

F: We'd say the stores aren't open yet grandma.

M: (Laugh) What she say?

F: She didn't like it. I don't know what's wrong with you people. This New York is nogood.

M: Is that what she said?

F: You sleeping all hours of the day.

M: She visited twice.

F: I think she came twice. But she didn't keep in touch with us.

M: She didn't?

F: No.

M: So she came and stayed with you. And you think she might not have been entirelywelcome by Momma Jones.

F: Well, Momma Jones took her. But why would she?

M: But from what you say, Momma Jones would take anybody.

F: Yes, she would.

M: With any connection at all.

F: She would. She was a family woman. So Baby Doll really had no relationship withyour mother. She was there because she was in town with her Jehovah Witnesses andwe were convenient to stay with. She could not stay with her son because there wastoo much going on over there.

M: So he wasn't saying, Mother, you can't stay.

F: No, he was just saying, we're playing cards. We'll be through soon. That type ofthing.

M: So she was too disgusted.

F: My father was very gregarious. He had a lot of friends. People liked him. And heliked them. He loved people. He kept something going.

M: Do you remember when he lived with you?

F: Not really. I don't know. Maybe I do. It was hard to say because Daddy was there allthe time.

M: He was? Was he there when Baby Doll was there?

F: Probably. It wasn't rare for him to be there. Men had to go and look after theirfamilies. Whether they lived there or not was another matter. They had to take care oftheir families. He paid our rent. He took care of us. So he came. He had to come.Sometimes he had to get Andrew straightened out about something. So he was there.Once a week he came and took me out.

M: But your mother must have gotten very annoyed about always having him around.

F: No, not completely. But she wasn't working, you know. So she had to take care ofher children. She had to do what she had to do. At least she didn't have him there allthe time.

M: What do you think her feeling was about this.

F: She didn't have him there all the time. I think it would have been insufferablebecause he was an alcoholic. Now I think that's the reason why she didn't want himthere. She didn't want her children brought up in a house with an alcoholic. And Iappreciated that.

M: Okay, "Picasso's Studio." It is a central piece in this work because you've opened upall the elements of "Les Demoiselles D'Avignon" to further interrogation. With lots ofpaintings preparatory to it, and the African masks. And they are all talking to WilliaMarie, and telling her that as a woman and as a black woman, she can be an artist. Sothat's what it is all about. You don't need to go through him.

F: No, go straight. Also that this work is coming out of that African mask becausePicasso tells lies every now and then.

M: He lies a lot. Like most artists.

F: Yes. In some references, he gives credit and some he doesn't.

M: An artist can rarely be trusted to be honest about all his influences.

F: Right. Some of them want to tell you they didn't get them from anybody. It just cameout of their own head. And they are all lying. I hate that.

M: You know what the commentators talk about constantly is that the masks he hadwere not the really good ones and they were just jumping off points for his own genius.He had cheap, not very good masks so it isn't possible that they were an actualinfluence. And then people want to argue and calculate that on such and such a date,the work that seems to have inspired him was not available for him to see in Paris, orwherever. And it just goes on and on and on. On the "Beach at St. Tropez." This manhere is Birdie.11

F: I wanted very much to do a beach scene. A European beach scene. And so I went toMarseille. That was the closest I could get to St. Tropez. And I went on my birthday.

M: Why was it on the beach at St. Tropez? Why couldn't it be on the beach atMarseille?

F: Because St. Tropez is just so much more romantic.

M: It is? What is the legend of St. Tropez?

F: That's where that French movie star use to be all the time.

M: Brigitte Bardot?

F: Brigitte Bardot. That's right. So you know, I just had to follow in that tradition.

M: "Dinner at Gertrude Stein's." It is very interesting the people you put in here.Particularly Willa Marie, Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin. And Richard Wrightand Langston Hughes with Gertrude Stein since they may not have ever gone there.

F: Who?

M: The black people.

F: I know that Richard Wright did. I am not sure about Langston Hughes. LangstonHughes had a very short presence in Paris and left there rather despondent. I don'tthink it was particularly good for him. James Baldwin I believe might have known herand was definitely a presence in Paris. As a matter of fact, when I went there in 61 Iwas looking for him. I was trying to sit around in cafes hoping he would walk by.

M: In regard to the paintings on the wall.

F: These are her collection.

M: This is Picasso's portrait of her.

F: Right.

M: This must be Matisse right?

F: Yeah, I guess so.

M: Why did you want to have a dinner at Gertrude Stein.

F: Because everybody went to Gertrude Stein. You had to go there because GertrudeStein was the center of expatriot and intellectual exchange and also because of theway she wrote. Her writings. And I wanted Willia Marie to know all these peoplebecause I never got a chance to meet any of these people.

M: Well, they are associated with Paris and they are all dead. She wasn't all that goodon race. Although she wrote about black people and it is obvious that she wasinfluenced by black culture in her writing. She was taking black rhythmic speech andusing it in her work.

F: Did you feel that? Because that is what I came up with.

M: Some scholars have now said that.

F: Do you think they got it from me?

M: I don't know. It is hard to say because that's what is coming out. She was veryinterested in popular culture. Ann Douglass wrote a book about the 20s and blackpeople and white people. Gertrude Stein is somebody she particularly focuses upon.Okay now. "Joe Baker's birthday." This is influenced by two Matisse compositions--sothis is another Matisse reference. This is the only painting in the group that is paintedby Willa Marie. This is her painting. She painted this.

F: Oh, I think they are all hers.

M: But she is in all of them.

F: No she is not. She's not in Matisse's Chapel.

M: No but this is a dream. It is not a painting.

F: Okay. She's not in the Arles painting.

M: Does she say she painted at Arles. No, this is a dream too.

F: It is not a dream. She was there. And I talk about how she is not in it because ofsomething in the story.

M: This is her painting. She painted this. This is another reclining nude but this time sheis the painter. Of course, it has got the switch on Olympia with the black womanreclining and the white woman as the maid. I say in my piece that Jo Baker is aninspirational figure for Willa Marie and Momma Jones because she was actually ahistorical black woman who came to Paris to realize her dreams and ambitions.Although she was not in the field of art. So I love this painting. But I think your storymakes reference to Baker having made a mistake in adopting so many children. Okayin "Les Cafes des Artistes," the story is very well spelled out as a dialogue betweenmale and female artists. Is there anything else you want to say about this?

F: No. It is my favorite cafe.

M: You put the black artists together with the white artists.

F: I don't remember what it is called.

M: It's called Cafes des Artistes.

F: It is.

M: Yeah.

F: It is right across the street from . . .

M: This is a famous cafe.

F: I love it.

M: This is where they all issued their manifestos.

F: It is right across the street from that famous church.

M: Notre Dame.

F: No.

M: St. Chapelle?

F: St. Germain des Pres. I put myself in there. (The only image she is actually in!)

M: And in "Moroccan Holiday," Willa is having a talk with her daughter with the malehistorical figures in the background. And these paintings in the background are WilliaMarie's?

F: Yes.

M: And Willia Marie in her later career is painting Frederick Douglass and MarcusGarvey, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

F: Un-huh.

M: Why?

F: Because she feels an affinity with these men. You don't know this story.

M: Well, this one I don't know as well. You know it was written much later than theothers.

F: Seven years later.

M: As a matter of fact, you faxed me a couple of times with different versions. Oh,yeah, Marlena is saying you didn't raise me. And then Willia Marie says it is so boringto be criticized for things that you can no longer do anything about. Moving on to theAmerican Collection and "We Came to America." This is a dream.

F: Yes.

M: The slaves are walking on the water in the dream. And the statue of liberty isholding a black baby.

F: The story is in there.

M: This story I know.

F: I am going to produce this book.

M: What do you mean?

F: I am still working on the stories. Would you like to help me?

M: Yes, I think I would. How about "Bessie's Blues?" What inspired this?

F: Well, Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe.

M: Alright let's go back. Andy Warhol was inspired to do this woman in this waybecause she is one of the most beautiful women in the world. And the way heportrayed her is in full regalia. But Bessie Smith is not considered one of the mostbeautiful women in the world.

F: No, but she was just considered the mother of the blues.

M: But then why is her face important enough to repeat over and over again?

F: Because that is why we know people. From their faces. And just because one has ablack face, it doesn't mean it shouldn't be memorialized.

M: Don't you think she also has a classic face?

F: Yes.

M: For a black woman.

F: She has a classic face period. I try to find beauty in everything. Not because it isbeautiful but because it is the truth.

M: Okay, how about the "Two Jemimas?" Are they beautiful also?

F: Oh, yeah. Because they are strong. They are bold.

M: But you do seem to be expressing some ambivalence about whether they arebeautiful or not.

F: Like what is it.

M: In the way you've done the faces and the hands. And the teeth in particular. I knowthat De Kooning did the "Two Women" but De Kooning didn't like his women but youare supposed to be liking yours.

F: You see, the minute you close their mouths and give them a silly smile, right awayyou are trying to atone for them not having all these things that pretty women aresupposed to have so let their teeth show and just make everything as bold andwonderful and sexy as they can be. Look how sexy they are. They've got on shortdresses. They've got big titties hanging. They are wearing jewelry. They are wearinghigh heel shoes. They are all turned over but so what.

M: But as you know, people get very upset about this painting because they don't knowhow to respond to it. As a matter of fact, I suspect that a lot of people think of this asbeing a variation on the same theme as stereotypical images such as those of KaraWalker or Beverly McGiver, which is making a black woman look like a damn fool.Figure 135-- Kara Walker, "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Figure 136--Beverly McIver, Figure137--Willem de Kooning, "Two Women."

F: No white person would ever paint a black person like this.

M: That's true. But no white person would do what Walker or McGiver are doing.

F: That's coming from the white view of uglying up black people. This is not uglying up.This is just giving you the truth of the situation. This is not ugly.

M: But some of the things that white people think of as ugly are the truth. If you givesomebody big red lips and big eyes.

F: But I am not giving anybody big red lips.

M: (pointing to the Jemimas) This is big red lips and big eyes.

F: She's got big eyes and big lips and she's got lipstick on them, Michele!

M: Faith, I do not accept that this is what white people do. Forget this. This is BeverlyMcGiver. I've never seen any white artist do anything like this. From the past or thepresent. You think that is a stereotype and this is not. But I am here to tell you thatpeople who think this (McGiver) a stereotype are in danger of thinking of that (the 2Jemimas) as a stereotype as well.

F: You know why? Because they get frightened when they look at something black.

M: That's what I am saying.

F: But everything that's black is not ugly.

M: Hello! That's what my book is about!

F: Just because it is big and its black, it is not ugly. I say that in my lecture, andeverybody gets very quiet.

M: They do?

F: Damn right.

M: Because we are still in very great tension about how we look.

F: That's why I did this. Because I don't want to be backed up in a corner.

M: Duane Hanson does the white version of Jemima.

F: You know, what this shows. It shows complete freedom to deal with blackness in allits manifestations.

M: It kind of goes back to your black light series. I love this painting. This is absolutelymy favorite: the 2 Jemimas. This comes full circle from "Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima,"because I am 49, menopausal and getting ready to look like this, along with the rest ofthe baby boomers.

F: When I did "Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima," I couldn't have done this.

M: Why?

F: I didn't have the confidence to paint huge images of black women like this. Theentire American Collection is about Marlena and her beautiful life. Except that she isnot getting married and not having any kids.

THE END

1 Sharon Patton, African-American Art (New York: Oxford UP, 1998).

2 William Rubin, ed. "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and theModern 2 Volumes (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984).

3 Faith, my grandmother Momma Jones, or Willi Posey, travelled via economy classwith my sister Barbara, 8, and I at 9 to France on the S.S. Liberte in June of 1961.

4 While we were in Rome, Aunt Barbara, Faith's sister, called to tell us that UncleAndrew, their oldest and only brother, the great love of the family, had died of a drugoverdose. He had had drug problems for a long time but for whatever reason, it seemshis death was entirely unanticipated by Momma Jones, Aunt Barbara or, finally, Faithwho had perhaps had prior thoughts of being prepared.

5 Faith had just recently attended a garden party benefit for the Rush Foundation at thehouse of Russell Simmons the hiphop music mogul in East Hampton.

6 When Faith's garden in Englewood was first completed by the landscape architect,she invited her grandchildren to see it. The middle child, Teddy, remarked, "ButGrandma, it is so fake." Faith has continued to repeat this remark ever since as a joke.

7 Faith has recently begun the Anyone Can Fly Foundation in order to provide grants toscholars to pursue the study of the visual culture of the African Diaspora. Faith iscurrently president of the foundation and I am vice-president.

8 Faith used to belong to the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Soho.

9 According to the book, sunflowers were not raised as large crops during Van Gogh'stime but rather seen occasionally in gardens or floral arrangements.

10 Ralph was Faith's brother who died at 2 about a year before Faith, herself was born.Indeed, she was conceived as a replacement baby for Ralph. Under the weight of hermother's depression she couldn't name her. The name Faith was provided by the nurseinstead.

11 Birdie is Burdette Ringgold, my stepfather, my spiritual father and Faith's husbandfor 40 years. He raised Barbara and I along with Faiith.

Michele Faith Wallace, the daughter of Faith Ringgold, is the author of BLACK MACHOAND THE MYTH OF THE SUPERWOMAN (1979), INVISIBILITY BLUES: FROM POPTO THEORY and BLACK POPULAR CULTURE. She is also Professor of English,

Women's Studies and Film Studies at the City College of New York and the CityUniversity of New York Graduate Center. The "Mona Lisa Interview" is an excerpt fromher forthcoming OLYMPIA'S SERVANTS: THE PROBLEM OF THE VISUAL IN AFRO-AMERICAN CULTURE, OR BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL. Contact Michele Wallace atolympiax@aol.com

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