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An Imprint of Histories from the Artists’ Studio Windows

JOOHEE  KIM

On a cinnamon-colored background, a girl wearing a red-dotted, orange-colored dress with a red and blue hairband stands in a court and stares at the viewer. The Conscience of the Court, one of Betye Saar’s (b. 1926) prints in Bookmarks in the Pages of Life, published in 2000, depicts Zora Neale Hurston’s (b. 1891–d. 1960) character Laura Lee Kimble, who, despite her innocence, struggles with a corrupt judiciary.(1) The scene is framed as if viewed from outside through a window. At the same time, it is not tightly framed—its boundary is jagged and, from behind her, the head of a clock extending beyond the frame underscores the urgency of justice. [Fig. 1] Those two spaces—the girl’s courtroom (outer world) and the blank background (the viewer’s space)—cross each other’s borders.

In Faith Ringgold’s (b. 1930) And Women? (2009), from her Declaration of Freedom and Independence (2009), two silhouettes of solemn faces are juxtaposed in a window-like frame with two glass panes, functioning as a faint background for overlapping text. Both women’s eyes demand justice, in different scopes, from the viewer. The text on the left, written by Abigail Adams (b. 1744–d. 1818) to John Adams (b. 1735–d. 1826) on March 31, 1776, argues that women should be treated as more than property and should be protected from men’s arbitrary power; the text on the right is from Sojourner Truth’s (b. 1797–d. 1883) 1851 speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?,” pointing out the irony that Black women’s rights are not regarded as crucial as not only men’s but also white women’s [Fig. 2]. 

For Saar and Ringgold, the window is an important conceptual and formal device. From her studio window, Faith Ringgold said, she sees her “determination to be free in America.”(2) For Betye Saar, “the window is a way of traveling from one level of consciousness to another, like the physical looking into the spiritual.”(3) The window here—where “the physical looks into the ‘spiritual’ or ‘determination’”—can be viewed as where its surface is between individual space and the outer world. Using the window as a metaphor, this essay attempts to not sweepingly define both artists’ oeuvres but, instead, to shed light on their print series, Declaration of Freedom and Independence and Bookmarks in the Pages of Life, and their implications in the milieu of the medium and in the historical context of the prints’ content. Like both artists’ metaphor of a window, these print series cross borders of individual and mainstream history and, consequently, bring the former into view.

Saar and Ringgold witnessed many important chapters in American history. The windows out of which they looked from their studios—one on the East Coast; the other, the West—showcased the atrocities of the past, the unequal realities of the present, and hope for the future. As highlighted by several studies, both artists faced a double bind in being neither white nor male, although their works were relatively more accepted in mainstream women’s art shows compared to other women artists of color.(4) Namely, Black nationalism and feminism impacted the arts community, transforming gender and race into contested spaces in the 1960s and ‘70s. Ringgold, who dictated a lot of activism to fighting for the representation of Black artists in art institutions including the 1970 Whitney protest, recalled, “trying to get the black man a place in the white art establishment left me no time to consider women’s rights. In the 1970s, being black and a feminist was equivalent to being a traitor to the cause of black people.”(5) Further, when Saar organized Black Mirror, an exhibition of works by five Black women artists at Womanspace in 1973, she encountered racism. In Womanspace Journal’s announcement of the show, Saar’s mixed-media The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972) was reproduced with a message for the journal’s predominantly white readership: “We don’t want to teach, we don’t want to preach—we want to share. We want YOU to look into OUR mirror.” Saar recalled, “It was as if we [Black women] were invisible again. The white women did not support it. I felt the separatism, even within the context of being in Womanspace.”(6) Yet, both Ringgold and Saar embraced the double bind and employed it creatively.

In Bookmarks in the Pages of Life and Declaration of Freedom and Independence, Saar and Ringgold weave, overlap, and enter into a dialogue with stories of racist and misogynist injustice through serigraph printmaking. With this method, ink is squeegeed through a mesh screen which is partially blocked out to leave behind stenciled shapes, and multiple screens are used to build up each image layer by layer, color by color. With each squeegee movement, previous printing traces become crucial ingredients for the final form. In other words, past and present histories could be superimposed through print. 

Betye Saar integrated elements of found objects—such as small plates from a jewelry shop that was going out of business—which often appear within the window frame in her artworks, including the serigraphs in Bookmarks in the Pages of Life. Saar’s well-known use of fractured elements appears in her print, collage, and assemblage works. Her iconic assemblage work, Black Girl’s Window (1968), uses a wooden window frame, stamp, daguerreotype, a small figurine, print, and painted prints to illustrate the view of her interior mind as a young Black girl encountering contemporary racial and gender issues. Yet the use of the window frame was foreshadowed in her earlier works on paper, such as Lo, The Mystique City (1965), and The Mystic Galaxy (1966). 

In 2000, Saar printed six serigraph illustrations of Hurston’s short stories on slavery from the 1930s and 1940s set in Harlem and small-town Florida, which compose Bookmarks in the Pages of Life. An American author and a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston based her work on her research on folklore and voodoo practices in New Orleans and Florida from 1927 and 1931.(7) Weaving the stories braided by Hurston with real history and space into six multi-colored serigraphs, Saar portrayed the racial struggles which Hurston observed in the American South in scenes constructed from fragmented fabric, faded photos, text, and patterned paper. By illustrating individual African American stories in each serigraph in the Bookmarks in the Pages of Life, Saar integrated each individual story into the larger vein of history.

 

The first serigraph, Magnolia Flower, opens with a story of the same title, published by Hurston in 1925 [Fig. 3]. In a square-shaped frame, a man in a neat suit and a hat gazes toward the viewer from behind palmetto palms which partially obstruct his view. The crescent moon is in the upper right corner of the frame; however, its yellow light reaches the scene over the frame. A Black man in white clothes and bloomed magnolia flowers appear at the bottom. The man in the suit, in Hurston’s story, is Bentley, who fled slavery to a Florida forest and married Swift Deer, a Cherokee maiden, and had a daughter named Magnolia Flower. When she turned seventeen, Magnolia Flower fell in love with John, a Black man with little money. Forbidden by Bentley to marry, she and John eloped. Hurston’s love story is told by a mighty river to a little brook, and through mother nature’s narration, it becomes a stream of history within which all generations’ stories accumulate. Such flow is also depicted in Saar’s serigraph: Bentley is placed at the furthest distance from the reader, while John and Magnolia are viewed at the closest distance from the reader (as a next-generation), who view the scene through a window-like frame. Namely, through diagonal composition and superimposition of each element onto the print surface, here Saar highlights an individual story’s progression through time, which ultimately becomes history.

 

In Now You Cookin’ with Gas, one of Saar’s prints from Bookmarks in the Pages of Life, a Black woman stands in a power posture (leans on her right foot, her left arm holding her left waist) on the edge of the page [Fig. 4]. To her left, two Black men in suits observe her. This image, which illustrates Hurston’s posthumously published story in Looking for Zora (1975), shows Harlem’s 132nd Street superimposed over a faded photograph of a building’s exterior, suggesting a window view from within the building. In Hurston’s story, the two men degrade the woman, who in turn threatens to “holler like a pretty white woman!” Saar has placed her on the edge of Harlem street as well as outside the rectangular frame. The liminal space of the window frame, where she stands, almost within the interior space rather than outside, connotes the Black women’s non-belonging but independent and strong status.

If Bookmarks in the Page of Life expands micro-history into a larger vein of history, Ringgold touches specifically on American history in Declaration of Freedom and Independence. For Ringgold, the view beyond the window is charged with the realities faced by Black people and women in a racist and misogynistic society, while the surface shows a self-reflexive silhouette; the reality that comes from such society’s view of “American” history and her silhouette that has an opposite point of view of that history—those two views overlap on the window. 

In two frames decorated with intricately woven ivy, an image of King George III standing before the British flag and stepping over a legion of people appears beside an image of a slave ship on a bloody sea. Subtitled All Men Are Created Equal, the images highlight the irony of the ongoing slave trade in a country celebrating its newfound freedom from British rule [Fig. 5]. As with All Men Are Created Equal and And Women?, the other four prints use the same framework—juxtaposition highlighting American history’s internal contradictions—highlighting a historical cycle that supports racial inequality. The third print, Absolute Tyranny, shows the killing of the African American man Crispus Attucks (b. 1723–d. 1770) who escaped slavery around 1750 and was killed by the British in the Boston Massacre on the evening of March 5, 1770 [Fig. 6]. The other image next to it illustrates a lynching of three African American men, which recalls one of the photographs Lawrence Beitler took on August 7, 1930, of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, who were lynched.(8) Almost everyone in Ringgold’s serigraph of the lynching scene is straight looking at the viewer with guiltless faces.

Therefore, with silhouettes or images of important African American historical figures or moments in two juxtaposed square frames, her series superimposes the “sacred” text of the Declaration of Freedom and Independence as an annotation to this fundamentally contradictory statement. She juxtaposes the historical scenes that are often viewed as “major” scenes with hidden, often unacknowledged, or less acknowledged historical scenes in two rectangular frames. In her artist statement, Ringgold crucially decodes one of the most famous lines of the Declaration of Independence (1776)—“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”—thus: “While actually meaning to say: white men, not black men, or white women–to say nothing of black women.”(9)  Critically pinpointing the self-contradiction of American history’s foundational text, Ringgold is hoping for an America where freedom and equality are undeniable realities.

As a window pane crosses the borders of individual and outer space, these print series cross borders of individual and so-called mainstream history and emphasize the importance of the individualized—namely marginalized—stories that could revert the historical narrative. Both artists share their re-imagination of American history via the serigraph, a technique which accumulates traces of different stages in time. In other words, Ringgold invites us to see the discrepancy between the white “American” history and its hidden scenes; Saar lets individual histories meet the amassing of history through prints.  

Like the women in Now You Cookin’ with Gas and in Declarations of Freedom and Independence, Ringgold and Saar are active participants, not passive onlookers beside a window. Living when Black women’s viewpoints were undervalued, in both the feminist and the civil rights movements, they considered this a creative and free position through which they could envision the solidarity of humanity.(10) Through their works, they ask us to choose which reflection we want to superimpose onto the stream of history being played out before us: Will we maintain the cycle of history, or break it to enable an American nation where everyone is “free” and “people are kinder to each other,” as Ringgold and Saar hope, is a reality?(11)

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(1) The story of The Conscience of the Court was from her story of the same title, The Conscience of the Court, published in 1950.

(2) Curlee Raven Holton and Faith Ringgold, Faith Ringgold: A View from the Studio (Charlestown, MA; Bunker Hill Publishing, 2005), 62.

(3) Makeda Best, “Inner Me, a Looking Through, a Looking Into,” in Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer, ed. Diana Seave Greenwald (New Jersey; Princeton University Press, 2023), 54.

(4) Saar’s work was included in the exhibition 25 California Women of Art at the Lytton Center of the Visual Arts in Los Angeles in 1968, and Ringgold participated in the Women Choosing Women show at the New York Cultural Center in 1973. Dallow, “Reclaiming Histories,” 78–82.

(5) Rebecca K. VanDiver, “Off the Wall, into the Archive Black Feminist Curatorial Practices of the 1970s,” Archives of American Art Journal 55, no. 2 (2016): 33; The Conference on Women in the Visual Arts, held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in April 1972, confirmed that there is an apparent different “purpose and ideology of the feminist artists and the Where We Art: Black Women Artists (WWA).” Faith Ringgold, “The 1970s: Is There a Woman’s Art?” We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1995), 175.

(6) Dallow, “Reclaiming Histories,” 78; VanDiver, “Off the Wall,” 34. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26566605; Kay Brown, “The Emergence of Black Women Artists: The 1970s, New York,” International Review of African American Art 15, no. 1 (1998): 46; Ringgold, “The 1970s,” 175.

(7) Hurston worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s, recording interviews with illiterate rural African Americans, including a Benin-born former slave named Cudjo Lewis (Oluale Kossola, b.1841–d.1935), the last slave ship survivor.

(8) The third man, James Cameron (b.1914–b.2006), narrowly escaped the murderous mob.

(9) Faith Ringgold, “Declaration of Freedom and Independence Statement” 2009. Italics mine.

(10) Ringgold said, “I’m not a member of those groups that would profit from being on the cutting edge.” “I’m not a man and I’m not white. So I can do what I want to do and that has been my greatest gift.” From “Interviewing Faith Ringgold/A Contemporary Heroine,” in Eleanor Flomenhaft, Faith Ringgold: A 25 Year Survey (Hempstead, NY: Fine Arts Museum of Long Island, 1990), 15.

(11) Ellen Y. Tani, “Review of Keeping Time in the Hands of Betye Saar: ‘Betye Saar: Still Tickin’.” American Quarterly 68, no. 4 (2016): 1103. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26360971.