Home > Exhibition > Essays > Betye Saar and Faith Ringgold: Printing New Possibilities at The Fabric Workshop and Museum

Betye Saar and Faith Ringgold: Printing New Possibilities at The Fabric Workshop and Museum

CAROLINE  KIPP

The printmaking and textile fields contain more similarities than differences, not least being their marginalized status within the fine arts hierarchy. You will frequently hear from their advocates that the medium was once central to society, legacies they wish were more often recognized. Print is thought to have originated from the decorative arts, transferring the dexterity and skill of metal engraving and textile’s carved wood blocks to meet new ends.(1) Embodied physicality and the mark of the hand are central tenants to the craft mediums, and the art of printmaking as well. Both are often gendered female, part and parcel of their fine art marginalization, along with linguistic ties in printmaking between matrix and “mother.”(2) They both rely a great deal on technology: printing presses, typesetting, screen-printing, looms, spinning wheels, the list goes on. And, as their functional technologies have become obsolete or further industrialized, these crafts have become sites of renewed artistic expression. All the same, prints on fabric are an area of twentieth and twenty-first century creative practice that is largely unexamined by scholars in either, perhaps a result of the (false) conceptual chasm that continues to exist between them. 

An exploration of the artworks Faith Ringgold (b. 1930) and Betye Saar (b. 1926) created during their individual artist-in-residence experiences at The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) in Philadelphia presents an opportunity to consider these intersections across two artistic practices, providing a rare insight into their creative processes. Ringgold and Saar are well-known for their innovative and experimental uses of diverse media including textiles and print; yet little attention has been given to their works straddling between contemporary printmaking and craft. These hybrid objects integrate the technical, material, and conceptual from both fields, bridging two mediums that rarely engage in sustained dialogue, and posing more questions than answers. Do these hybrid objects also form a bridge between their two-dimensional and three-dimensional works? What does it mean for them to be neither fully a print nor fully a textile? How does the inclusion of fabric alter the available readings of these prints?

Founded in 1977, The Fabric Workshop and Museum is an experimental artist-in-residence program based on the contemporary printmaking ateliers of Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop, Tamarind Institute, Gemini G.E.L., and Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE); and it draws from historical and commercial textile workshops like Marimekko in Finland, William Morris & Co. in England, and the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany. However, unlike other contemporary artist residencies, FWM uniquely provides the opportunity for artists to explore the art and craft of printing on fabric, as artists from a variety of disciplines are invited to work with the master and apprentice printers using semi-industrial scale resources. Twenty-two artists, including Sam Gilliam (1933-2022) and Robert Kushner (b. 1949), visited within the first year and the program has been running steadily since. The initial expectation was that artists would produce four-way repeat yardage using silkscreen printing. However, early out of the gate artists began asking to create ever more experimental works, and FWM’s founder Marion “Kippy” Boulton Stroud fostered a culture of saying “yes” to boundary pushing endeavors, stating that “the question of high vs. low and art vs. craft became irrelevant once we began to work with artists, since their work could be all of these at once.”(3)

In addition to a permanent collection composed of artists-in-residence projects, the FWM’s archives contain extensive documentation of each artist’s time at the institution. These include fabrication development and technique notes, educational papers, and the archive’s greatest treasure of all, the “artist boxes.” Assembled by FWM at the completion of a project, they serve as a “time capsule for each artist residency… [and] include samples, prototypes, swatches, correspondence, and other related materials.”(4) It is within these boxes that Ringgold and Saar’s residencies can be unpacked, handled, and pondered over.

BETYE SAAR, TAKIN’ A CHANCE ON LUV’, 1984

1984, when Betye Saar visited FWM as a resident artist, was not her first encounter with printmaking. Years of exploration and training across etching, ink drawings, lithography, and intaglio, as well as a formal education in design at [school] had developed into a graphic personal style focused on cosmology and spiritual imagery which she readily translated into her work at FWM.(5) At the time of Saar’s residency her practice had expanded beyond prints and sculptures, and she was invested in creating site-specific installations. Room-filling displays like “Oasis” (1984), and later “House of Fortune” (1988) and “Resurrection” (1988) invited visitors to momentarily exist in her immersive universe. In this context, Saar’s FWM project speaks to ideas of another, unrealized environment she envisioned, though perhaps not one made for the public. Her original notes and correspondences with master printer Robert Smith and Stroud indicate her first project idea was to create an entire bed set: duvet, pillow covers, and all.(6) One can imagine her works covering every surface of a perfectly outfitted enclave, an updated dream room (literally and metaphorically) draped in Saar’s personal cosmology, reminiscent of Gloria Vanderbilt’s “patchwork bedroom.”(7)

Working closely with Smith, Saar created Takin’ A Chance on Luv’, an edition of ten, queen-sized duvet covers that draws its imagery from her lexicon of signs and symbols.(8) A gilded crescent moon; a radiant star; two flaming mauve hearts; two fish – one leaping through a lady’s tasseled fan; a palmist’s sign with spirals connected to cosmic and romantic symbols; and two dice tumble across an errantly gridded center, indicating the fortunes playing at hand. The duvet was created in three different colorways, with a log-cabin piecework top, and designed to function as both a wall-hanging and a real bed cover. While there are no notes on the title, which may reference the 1940 musical Cabin in the Sky, Takin’ A Chance on Luv’ alludes to romantic encounters, resonating with the imagery and its functionality. When displayed, the duvet drapes like any wall-hanging. However, knowing the intended use of this type of object, it is nearly impossible to see the vertical duvet without evoking images of the bed and its associations with home, the body, intimacy, birth, death, and dreams, rather than a tapestry or a painting. Reoriented horizontally, the duvet’s scattered, surreal imagery speaks to tabletops and alters — sites of divination and connection to the spiritual, further gesturing to the bed as a similar site of divine dreaming and mystical experience. All at once, Takin’ A Chance on Luv’ nods to many possible readings, drawing inferences from myriad sources including her earlier assemblage inspired lithography print Fragments (1976), and her collaboration with quilter Judy Matieson to create Fantasies (1981), as well as Harriet Power’s appliquéd mystic and biblical Pictorial Quilt (1895-1898), and Miriam Schapiro’s femmage compositions like Barcelona Fan (1979).

These multiple layers of meaning and narrative present in Saar’s collaged imagery speak to Sampada Aranke’s theory of “functional abstractions,” which operate in Black aesthetics when “the Black body is figured as a series of substitutive, sensorial objects that give rise to a sense of how Black life is aesthetically imagined,” subverting the boundaries that white supremacy culture and violence would seek to confine Black experience within.(9) Aranke applies this framework across media categories, including printmaking, noting that materials carry embedded histories, which means that no material choice can be considered “neutral.” These associations can be accessed to lend greater significance to the artist’s concepts, yet with cotton’s history tied to enslavement in the United States it is worth pausing to consider the material choices Saar and Ringgold made in their FWM artworks, both of whom deeply understand the nuanced meanings of materiality. This multivalent signaling further emphasizes Aranke’s ideas that “functional abstractions” simultaneously illustrate and subvert the constructs of Blackness. Through this lens, the domestic textiles, mystical signs, and hand drawn gestures composing Saar’s Takin’ A Chance on Luv’ can be read as a shared repository where “the sensorial and the visual, the embodied and the illustrated, the deeply abstracted and representational qualities of Black life”(10) can all be found conversing at once.

FAITH RINGGOLD, TAR BEACH #2, 1990

 By 1989, FWM had been in operation for twelve years and had hosted many prominent artists, but Faith Ringgold’s residency was considered especially important. Ringgold’s explicitly political and feminist imagery, as well as her efforts to subvert media hierarchies were vital in the development of feminist practices during the 1970s and 1980s.(11) These factors made Ringgold’s acceptance of the residency invitation a noteworthy moment for Stroud and the FWM staff, and they made every effort to accommodate her ambitious project proposal.(12)

Unlike Saar’s improvisational experimentation, Ringgold’s imagery was already well-established and she intended to transfer her 1988 painting Woman on a Bridge #1 of 5: Tar Beach onto cloth. The complexities of doing so proved more involved than anyone had initially expected, but FWM staff were advised by Stroud to do whatever was necessary to make Ringgold’s vision come to life.(13) When the residency concluded, Ringgold returned home to California, but the project continued as FWM sent her weekly packages with new samples of custom-dyed and printed fabrics to ensure that the colors and imagery were exactly what the artist intended. Ringgold’s relationship with master printer Robert Smith was integral to working out all the (major) details of translating the image to fabric, and archived correspondences speak to their warm, working relationship, defined by mutual levels of trust and respect.

Transferring the text to a printed textile form proved most difficult of all, and a nearly inexhaustible number of samples attest to this.(14) Yet these pieces also illustrate that printmaking is a place of experimentation, for chance and human hands to intervene in unexpected and surprising ways. The FWM artist boxes document these layers of ideas, acting as three-dimensional sketchbooks, and the process of unearthing stratum of fabric feels like you’re only trailing a few steps behind the artists as they discover the path forward. Ringgold and Smith finally did arrive at a fitting solution, and in 1990 Tar Beach #2 was created as an edition of twenty-four unique fabric printed works with quilted borders. 

In printmaking questions about “originality” continue to surface, both by artists who actively engage with the idea of multiples as a theoretical and visual tool and by historians and critics who perpetuate ideas that value only “operates in the realm of the ‘original’ that is authenticated via uniqueness, cultural significance and commercial value.”(15) These contentions play out on the surface of Tar Beach #2, which exists in the vein of limited edition artist prints – conferring additional status through their small production runs. Yet Tar Beach #2 veers into the lane of originals through its pieced borders and the sky’s rainbow roll which are each unique across the edition of twenty-four. 

Scholar Julia-Bryan Wilson theorizes that textiles always exist in a place of multiplicity and ambivalence. They are simultaneously a form of traditional material culture, and a resource for non-conventional artistic, social, and political enactments. The second function develops, in part, as a reaction to their traditional histories, and it means both lexicons are simultaneously signaled whenever textiles are used in new functions or scenarios. These opposed readings make it difficult to clearly interpret textiles, thus turning them into sites of contradiction where projections and fantasies overlap. It is this multiplicity which makes textiles as objects, material culture, and artworks so interesting, because they contain the ability to stretch limits and hold tensions – both literally and metaphorically.(16) Extending this theorization to include print, as exemplified through Ringgold and Saar’s employment, gestures to the fields’ intertwinement across material culture as sites of disputed communication, functionality, creative agency, and thus as places of enduring meaning and value.

While at FWM, both Saar and Ringgold were experimenting with alternative possibilities in their imagery and materiality. They found a way to access the conceptual and technical in print and fabric, bringing both sets of discourse into their works. Through her repertoire of symbols, the quilt’s assemblage construction, and its conceptual use in environment building, Takin’ A Chance on Luv’ aligns with Saar’s larger artistic practice, and functions as an entry point to bridge between her prints and three-dimensional works. Likewise, for Ringgold, Tar Beach #2 functions as a cross-over between her printed, published texts and her painted story quilts, illustrating the way images shift across media to accommodate creative impulses. The existence of twenty-four Tar Beach #2 works also extends Ringgold’s imagery and cultural cache across institutional spaces, increasing the significance of this image as the lodestone of Ringgold’s materially diverse, and decades spanning practice.

_______________________

(1)  Elizabeth Wyckoff, “Matrix, Mark, Syntax: A Historical View of Printmaking in Relation to Its Techniques,” in Hard Pressed: 600 Years of Prints and Process (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2000), 13.

(2) Kathryn Reeves, “The Re-Vision of Printmaking,” in Perspectives on Contemporary Printmaking: Critical Writing Since 1986, ed. Ruth Peltzer-Montada (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).

(3) Sims Patterson, “MBS & FWM,” in Process and Practice: The Fabric Workshop and Museum, ed. Susan Lubowsky Talbott (Philadelphia: The Fabric Workshop and Museum and MW Editions, 2017), 13.

(4) “Museum Archive,” The Fabric Workshop and Museum (blog), accessed October 28, 2022, https://fabricworkshopandmuseum.org/archive/.

(5) “Betye Saar | Hammer Museum,” accessed November 27, 2022, https://hammer.ucla.edu/now-dig-this/artists/betye-saar.

(6) Smith, Robert. Notes from conversation with Betye Saar. 12 October 1984. Betye Saar Artist File. The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA. 

(7) Kayleigh Perkov, “Pattern Consciousness: Counterculture-Influenced Interior Design,” in With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985, ed. Anna Katz (New Haven: The Museum of Contemporary Art in association with Yale University Press, 2019).

(8) “Betye Saar,” The Fabric Workshop and Museum (blog), accessed November 27, 2022, https://fabricworkshopandmuseum.org/artist/bettye-saar/.

(9) Sampada Aranke, “Functional Abstractions: Sensorial Afterlives of The Black Body,” in A Site of Struggle: American Art against Anti-Black Violence, ed. Janet Dees (Princeton University Press, 2022), 74.

(10) Aranke, 71.

(11) Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 14.

(12) Christina Roberts (Director of Education, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia) in discussion with the author, November 30, 2022.

(13) Christina Roberts, November 30, 2022.

(14) The solution finally arrived in the use of silver ink, which had the saturation and clarity to make the text pop against the rainbow roll sky.

(15) Richard Harding, “Print as Other: The Future Is Queer,” in Perspectives on Contemporary Printmaking: Critical Writing Since 1986, ed. Ruth Peltzer-Montada (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 105, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=1857133.