A large story quilt opens onto a glowing field of sunflowers beneath a pale blue sky and buildings of Arles, France. Across the center, eight Black women stand shoulder to shoulder behind a quilt patterned with “Van Gogh” sunflowers: Madam C. J. Walker, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Ella Baker. Their names are written on the edge before them, turning the picture into both portrait and record. At lower left is Willia Marie Simone, American artist Faith Ringgold’s fictional Black woman artist-traveler from her “The French Collection” series, looking upward into the scene. At far right, iconic artist Vincent van Gogh stands apart holding cut sunflowers, more observer than hero. Handwritten text runs along the border, so the quilt is image, story, and testimony at once. Ringgold transforms Arles from a site of European artistic myth into a gathering place for Black women’s intellect, labor, survival, and political imagination. Quilting is the key. It is communal rather than solitary, historically linked to women’s work, Black memory, and intergenerational making. These sitters are not random icons but builders of freedom like abolition, anti-lynching journalism, civil rights, education, economic self-determination, and grassroots organizing stitched into one shared surface. The sunflower carries layered meaning. It nods to van Gogh, but Ringgold reclaims that visual legacy, placing Black women at the center while the famous male painter stands respectfully at the edge. In Ringgold’s broader thinking, quilting can stand for piecing a broken world back together. This work imagines art as collective world-making. Born in Harlem, Ringgold had learned sewing and fabric traditions through her mother, Willi Posey, and by 1991 she was fully using the story quilt to collapse the old hierarchy between “fine art” and so-called craft. Here, the women author history, beauty, and change together.
“The French Collection Part I, #4: The Sunflowers Quilting Bee at Arles” by Faith Ringgold (American) - Acrylic on canvas with pieced fabric border / 1991 - Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Illinois) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomenArtists #FaithRinggold #Ringgold #art #artText #BlackArt #MCAChicago
