“There’s no reason why art has to be so complicated and difficult to deal with. That’s one of the things I’ve gotten from the feminist movement.”~Faith Ringgold
Acrylic on canvas with embroidered and pieced fabric soft sculpture
60 x 12 x 16 in.
Ringgold began making sculptures of people she knew, based on people she had admired in her childhood. Mrs. Jones and Family is a representation of Ringgold’s own mother with her three children, Andrew, Barbara, and Faith. Faith, the youngest, is on her lap, while Barbara and Andrew stand to either side of her.
Ringgold represented several women she knew and felt close to in her Family of Woman Mask Series: Mrs. Brown was a woman Ringgold considered another mother, and she made her figure in cloth and placed her daughter, also made of cloth in her lap. Another woman, Florence, is someone who Faith remembered being very beautiful and watching her dress up, remembering how she would seek being close to her.
For Ringgold, her work developed from working alone in her studio to a work mode that allowed her to work at home and work communally. She thought about the relationships between people then and when she was growing up, a time when she felt people were closer to each other. On many figures and sculptures, she worked collaboratively with her mother, Willi Posey. For these figures Posey made clothes that are attached to the mask to create a body. The figures in this work are placed together as sculptures, but they are hooded, and have openings for eyes and mouth so that they could be worn as hooded masks.