Artist Combines Storytelling and Quiltmaking

Although most artist vary in ways of approaching to their artwork, the modern ones approaches it based on their ideas, thoughts and feelings. Then there are a few artists who approach art with their own unique art form of ingenuity. It seemed like a exceptional creation to narrate storytelling through quilted cloth, particularly for a black feminist artist during the black power movements of the Harlem Renaissance. During this time period, an inequity in the art world for black artists was a struggle to express themselves as visual artist. Artists who were of color, was considered an indifferent in the art world during that period. The only dominate artist then were previously been white-males or European immigrates. Although African American artist problematic was oppression, during Harlem Renaissance, Faith Ringgold commenced to fabricate a new form of artist technique called "story quilts". This technique consist of painting or handwriting text on quilted fabric, all three of which Ringgold artistic formed to create "... a platform for mixing art and ideas so that neither suffers." She fused her paintings and storytelling skills to compose a series of art sculptures. She took these elements and media to create and narrate a series of quilts that were a reflection of overcoming challenging inequities in the world of art.

Notorious for her genre of painting story quilts, Faith Ringgold is an inspiration for people of color, in much of her artwork using words and visuals together. Ringgold has several series of story quilts portraying and narrating a blend of memoirs, self-analysis, her childhood in Harlem to commenting difficulties, and historical and cultural events. "...a combination of analysis and personal writing..." Each story quilt she created included pictures with text fabricating its own unique story. Ringgold enhanced her art talent by combining her appreciation of traditional quilt making, genre painting with her narration and storytelling. Ringgold guru is painting, but she personalized her work from a traditional painting on a framed canvas to a frame of fabricated quilted canvas.

The art concept behind Ringgold's art draws upon her life experience as a black woman living during the Harlem Renaissance in a black subculture as the basis for her work, "...to explore through word and image the central tropes of black life." Almost every aspect of our lives is about history are making history. How we see it has changed over the period of time. The artistic form of telling history, folklore, is by storytelling or narration is blemishing. Ringgold was inspired by her society concern and wanted to communicate and connect at the same time with a message of hope. The generation and eras of ancestors who struggle through the Great Depression are beginning to disintegrate. Our social cultural has modified to depending on film and cameras for gathering or capturing historical events. Their attention span is not gratified to a personality of a folklore or narrator. "...When Uncle Hilliard came to visit we never missed a chance to laugh at his stories." Ringgold grew up surrounded by storytellers from close relatives to close friends of the family. She recalls that as a little girl late at night, being so attentive and quiet when every her father and uncle would reminiscence on their lives growing up. "...achievement of the American dreams." Ringgold made sure she paid close attention to details, as if she was living that moment in time right then.

Ringgold narrates an excellent combination of survival and redemption with revealing the appreciation of traditional of quilting. "The story quilts grew out of my need to tell stories not with pictures or symbols alone, but with words..." Ringgold knew that quilts by African ancestors were influenced by the weaving done by the men in Africa. When slaves were brought to America, the women continued the tradition as a domestic trade. In slave oriented communities, the quilts served various purposes: warmth, preserving memories and events, storytelling, and even as "message boards" for the Underground Railroad to guide slaves on their way north to freedom.

Ringgold narrated a quilt series that is indication of the Harlem Renaissance is a triptych called The Street Story . The triptych is depiction of a fictional heroin in characterize images of oppression and deprivation of a black subculture neighborhood. "The dilemma of survival carries over into Ringgold's own life..." The plot of the