Passage II

Faith Ringgold’s Quilting Bee

The artist Faith Ringgold has made a name for herself with her “story quilts,” lively combinations of painting, quilting, and storytelling. Each artwork consists of a painting framed by quilted squares of fabric and story panels. One of these artworks, The Sunflowers Quilting Bee at Arles, depicts a scene of women at work on a quilt in a field of towering yellow flowers that eight African American women sit around the quilt that covers their laps. Who are these people stitching among the flowers? What brings them so close that their shoulders touch?

Thus, the answers to these questions can be found in the artwork itself. Ringgold has told the story of this gathering on two horizontal panels of text. One panel is sewn into the piece’s top border, the other into it’s bottom border. These eight women the story explains, strove in their various ways to support the cause of justice in the world.

In reality, these women never met to piece together a quilt. The scene comes out of the artists imagination as a statement of the unity of purpose that she perceives in their lives. Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman fought to abolish slavery and, later, was active in the crusade for suffrage. Newspaper journalist Ida B. Wells courageously spoke out for social and racial justice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Establishing her own hair products business, herself in the first decade of the twentieth century, millions of dollars were later bequeathed by Madam C. J. Walker to charities and educational institutions. Among the schools that benefited from this generosity, were those that Mary McLeod Bethune opened and ran in order to provide a better education for Black students. And Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Rosa Parks showed leadership and strength during the civil rights movement, it happened in the 1950s and 1960s.

In the artwork, Ringgold has surrounded these women with bright sunflowers. The flowers seem to celebrate the women’s accomplishments and the beauty of their shared vision. (30)