Browse Items (72 total)

Ringgold’s narrative screen-print, or serigraph, centers on the life of the celebrated African-American painter, Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937). While the text surrounding the central image provides a straight-forward account of a moment in Tanner’s…

Saar’s gestural print of a girl jumping rope escapes the charm typically associated with childhood play, instead infusing the scene with the vigor of the child’s rapid movement. The smudges of ink at the girl’s feet evoke dust kicked up by the rope…

In the early 1970s, Ringgold produced several posters using cut-and-pasted paper in red, green, and black --that is, the colors of the Pan-African flag. Two of these posters were intended to be reproduced and sold in support of the Committee to…

From his jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama in April 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote an open letter to eight white clergymen who had criticized King’s “unwise and untimely” demonstrations of civil disobedience. Richly illustrated by Ringgold in…

Betye Saar regards the sky as an important aspect of nature and expresses its mystical aspects through a careful manipulation of form. Her fantastical rendition of the sky in LA–Saar’s place of birth–cannot be confined to traditional rectangular and…

Betye Saar states: “The stars, the cards, the mystic vigil may hold the answers. By shifting the point of view an inner spirit is released. Free to create.” Saar places symbols in her mystic sky: the decorative mask represents “hidden identity and…

Bookmarks in the Pages of Life is a collection of illustrations Saar made to accompany short stories by Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), a prolific author whose profoundly impactful works, such as Their Eyes Were Watching God (published in 1937),…