Home > Exhibition > Essays > Meeting in the Moment: The Black Feminism of Faith Ringgold and Betye Saar in the 1960s and Beyond

Meeting in the Moment: The Black Feminism of Faith Ringgold and Betye Saar in the 1960s and Beyond

ASHLEY  COPE

Faith Ringgold (b. 1930) and Betye Saar (b. 1926) are artists who layer both the vital and mundane stuff of life—memories, traditions, spirituality, joy, pain, kitsch, culture. Ringgold’s painted Story Quilts, a form which she originated, combine the ancestral and familial tradition of quilting with political messages derived from her own beliefs and lived experiences as a Black woman. Saar, who is known primarily for her assemblage works, brings together family history, mystical inspiration, and derogatory images of African Americans in order to re-write harmful narratives and imagine brighter futures. In Saar’s assemblages, the gathered figurines, fabrics, prints, photographs, and other miscellanea she collects possess a cumulative quality of significance, ultimately transforming into something completely new as each new layer is added.

Beginning in the 1960s, both Ringgold and Saar began addressing the complex layers of their own lives as Black women—and as mothers, teachers, part-time and full-time workers, feminists, Black civil rights activists, artists, and keepers of family histories—in their artworks. At the same time, social and artistic movements which addressed issues of racism and gender inequality intensified, though the priorities of these two interest groups seldom overlapped. Where the Black Power and Black Arts movements were dominated by Black men, the women’s liberation and Feminist Art movements were primarily directed by white women. Ringgold recalls her experience in this exclusionary political and artistic landscape in the 1960s and 70s, stating:

The white woman was trying to bring the Black and white man together because she really had no power, and the only way to acquire it was by bringing together the men. Black women were literally out of the picture, period. It took decades before people realized that we existed.(1)

Ringgold illustrated the erasure of Black women in the fight for civil rights and women’s liberation in her 1967 painting The Flag Is Bleeding, in which a white woman links arms with a white man and a Black man; the white woman in Ringgold’s image serves to literally bridge the gap between the white and Black man, a reflection of the white woman “trying to bring the Black and white man together” to acquire her own power. A blood-splattered American flag is superimposed over Ringgold’s figures, further alluding to the turbulent struggles for Black civil rights and women’s liberation in the United States; however, the Black woman was excluded from these projects in official and visible capacities, and therefore remains absent in Ringgold’s painting.(2)

In response to the civil rights movement and to women’s liberation—and also their exclusion from these efforts—both Ringgold and Saar drew on their personal experiences and the shared experiences of Black women more broadly to bring  critical attention to the pervasive issues of racism and gendered exclusion. As part of that mission, both artists took up the challenge of re-writing the story of Aunt Jemima, the stereotypical ‘mammy’ figure that appeared on syrup bottles and pancake boxes from the Aunt Jemima brand until the company removed her image and rebranded in 2021. Both Ringgold and Saar addressed Aunt Jemima as a distinctly Black feminist issue in a period when movements dedicated to Black civil rights efforts and women’s issues were divided and gender and race lines.(3) For both artists, then, Aunt Jemima—a derogatory caricature of a Black woman—emerged as a Black feminist subject that addressed their unique experiences and their double exclusion from both the male-centric Black civil rights movements and the white-centric feminist movements of the 1960 and 1970s.

In 1972, Saar took up the subject in The Liberation of Aunt Jemima [Fig. 1] which she calls her “first piece that was politically explicit.”(4) Saar’s anger and political activism were heightened four years earlier with the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As a mother of three young children, Saar was unable to attend demonstrations, but she was able to create work that dealt with her anger.(5) Therefore, when a community center near Black Panther-controlled Oakland “issued an open invitation to Black artists to be in a show about Black heroes…[Saar] decided to make a Black heroine.”(6) Describing the process of creating The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, Saar stated:

For many years, I had collected derogatory images…I found a little Aunt Jemima mammy figure, a caricature of a black slave, like those later used to advertise pancakes. She had a broom in one hand and, on the other side, I gave her a rifle.(7)

Saar armed her Aunt Jemima figure to present her as a warrior “rebelling against her past enslavement.”(8) With her broom on one side and rifle on the other, Saar’s Aunt Jemima resembles Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton as he appeared on a Black Panther poster in which he holds a rifle in his right hand and a spear in the left.(9) While Saar herself is not a proponent of violence, she recalled in an 2010 interview that to “get somebody’s attention, all you have to do is have a gun.”(10) Arming and recontextualizing Aunt Jemima—and derogatory ‘mammy’ caricatures more broadly—Saar recycled racist imagery from the past to produce a positive image of a revolutionary Black woman in the present. Eleven years later, Ringgold took up Aunt Jemima as the subject of her first ever Story Quilt, the artform Ringgold pioneered by drawing on her familial ties to quiltmaking, a craft her family traced back to their African heritage; her Story Quilts combine utilitarian craft and narratives about Ringgold herself and the Black community at large, culminating in works which elevate quilting as an art and spotlight Black perspectives. Before she began work on her 1983 work Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima? [Fig. 2], Ringgold approached her daughter, feminist author and cultural historian Michele Wallace, about writing an article about Aunt Jemima as a feminist issue; though Wallace was not interested in taking up the project, Ringgold remained dedicated to rewriting the figure’s life story.(11) Ringgold rejected the condemnation of Aunt Jemima, particularly by other Black women, saying:

people are…condemning her for being fat and Black and having a big nose. What is that? That’s nothing!...That’s not something you’re supposed to condemn a person for. This is a woman. I’m going to rewrite her life; I’m going to give her a career, and a family, and talk about the important things in her life, not the way she looks.

In Ringgold’s first Story Quilt, Aunt Jemima becomes Jemima Blakey, a woman with a complete family history, a strong marriage, children who grow up and get married, and her own restaurant business in Harlem.(12) “She becomes an entrepreneur and she’s just fabulous in my story,” Ringgold says of the titular protagonist in Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?.(13) Though the figure of Aunt Jemima that previously represented the popular pancake and syrup brand was originally based on a non-fictional woman named Nancy Green, Ringgold’s story re-directs viewers’ attention towards the histories of the women who Aunt Jemima broadly represents: “Black women who worked as caretakers and cooks,” often “for both white families and their own.”(14) Though not the center of Ringgold’s Story Quilt, Green has her own important history. Born into slavery in 1834, she later moved to Chicago to serve as a caretaker for a white family, and in 1893 was hired to portray Aunt Jemima at the Chicago World’s Fair; Green served as the company’s face from 1893 until her death in 1923.(15) Rather than rewrite Green’s personal life story, Ringgold’s narrative presents Aunt Jemima and ‘mammy’ figures more broadly as capable of the complexity and individuality typically denied to stereotyped figures. Ringgold imagines a life story for Aunt Jemima that places agency directly into the hands of the ‘mammy’ stereotype via the fictional Jemima Blakey. Though the Blakey’s life somewhat mirrors Green’s—they both left the southern United States for northern states and both tragically passed away in car accidents(16)—Ringgold’s protagonist makes her way to Harlem and opens her own successful restaurant.

Beyond their engagement with Aunt Jemima in political artworks, both Ringgold and Saar were active in the broader struggles of Black women artists in the 60s and 70s. Despite museums beginning to draw attention to Black artists and women artists, Black women continued to be excluded from most public exhibitions at mainstream institutions. Even landmark exhibitions in 1976, Two Centuries of Black American Art: 1750-1950 and Women Artists: 1550-1950, were overwhelmingly male and white respectively.(17)

Motivated to combat the unique challenges they faced as Black women artists in this period, both Ringgold and Saar became involved in various Black and/or feminist art organizations—based in Los Angeles, Saar joined feminist artist Judy Chicago, designer Sheila Lebrant de Bretteville, and art historian Arlene Raven at the Women’s Building (Womanspace) which the three founded in Los Angeles in 1973; the space was also home to feminist creatives “Audre Lorde, Rachel Rosenthal, Adrienne Rich, Martha Rosler,” and many more.(18) Saar joined the board for Womanspace and remained active with the Women’s Building in varying capacities until it closed in 1991.(19) In 1973, she worked with another influential Black woman artist of the West Coast, Samella Lewis, to co-curate and participate in Black Mirror, an exhibition of Black women artists held at Womanspace. In the press release for the exhibition, Saar is quoted: “The black woman has been labeled ‘mammy,’ Aunt Jemima, Sapphire, and ‘ba-by.’ Hey, we’re all that and more.”(20) The show and its rich slate of programming centered on “interpreting the black woman’s reflections of herself, the way she lives, the thoughts she thinks, and the way she looks, loves and creates.”(21)

On the East Coast, Ringgold was deeply engaged in protest efforts to include more Black artists, and especially Black women, in museum spaces such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. In 1968, Ringgold initiated the first demonstration of Black artists at the Whitney, and in the same year she launched a campaign with light sculptor Tom Lloyd to protest the MoMA for a wing for Black and Puerto Rican art named in memory of Martin Luther King Jr.(22) Around the same time, Ringgold began her series of bold political posters which included works like Committee to Defend the Panthers [Fig. 3], a serigraph version of which is included in Ringgold | Saar: Meeting on the Matrix. In 1970, Ringgold joined forces with feminists and personal friends Lucy Lippard and Poppy Johnson in an ad hoc women’s art group; together, the group demonstrated against the Whitney Museum to fight for the inclusion of women in the 1970 Whitney Sculpture Annual. Ringgold’s particular emphasis was on the inclusion of Black women sculptors; she “unconditionally demanded” that Betye Saar and Barbara Chase-Riboud be included in the show, leading to Saar and Chase-Riboud becoming the first Black women ever exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art.(23) And later, in 1975, Ringgold curated another show of Black women’s art at the Women’s Interarts Center in New York titled Eleven; the show included Betye Saar, Adrian Piper, Alma Thomas, and eight others, each of whom are known for their work in diverse media.(24)

By the 1980s, Ringgold was vice president of minority affairs for the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA), though she found she “still had very little success in networking with women of color.”(25) To combat the isolation of women artists of color, Ringgold conceived of a large-scale collaborative project that would “bring together a network of artists” and “give them much-needed visibility, support, and national attention.”(26) To discuss the possibility of such a project, painter and print-maker Margaret Gallegos helped to coordinate a lunch in Santa Monica where over thirty-five women of color, including Ringgold and Saar, gathered and pledged to contribute to Coast to Coast, a Women of Color National Artists Book Project which would consist of individual artist books from participating women of color; in February 1988, one-hundred and twenty artist books representing artists from across the United States were exhibited at the WCA national conference in Houston, Texas.(27)

More recently, Ringgold and Saar have been featured in group exhibitions together that highlight their innovations as well as those of their peers in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, a sign that institutions are beginning to recognize and highlight the achievements of Black women artists who paved the way in the mid-20th century for emerging generations of artists. The Brooklyn Museum’s 2018-2019 exhibition, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, included Ringgold’s political poster prints, such as her 1972 offset lithograph United States of Attica. The show also included Saar’s Liberation of Aunt Jemima from the same year.(28) The museum’s 2017 exhibition, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85, highlights the Black feminist work of Ringgold, Saar, Barbara Chase-Riboud (b. 1939), Emma Amos (1937-2020), and other Black women artists who had to fight for their own voice in a significant period of political art production for Black people and women.(29) That their contributions to Black civil rights and feminist efforts are now being recognized in certain institutions is a sign of their lasting influence and the significant impact Ringgold, Saar, and other Black women artists had despite the immeasurable challenges and discrimination they faced in an already tumultuous period. Regardless of their increased recognition in recent decades, neither of these titans of art have slowed their efforts to address issues of gender and race in their art. “I could use a nap,” Saar said at 90 years old, “but there is too much to do.”(30)

More recent works by Saar, such as I’ll Bend but I Will Not Break (1998), continue to address the labor of Black women and the history of slavery.(31) Her older works of the 1960s and 1970s remain relevant beacons of Black feminist art production as well. In 2007, activist and academic Angela Davis declared that the Black women’s movement began with Saar’s work The Liberation of Aunt Jemima; “That was a real thrill,” said Saar.(32)

Ringgold continues in her mission to make art and its institutions more accessible to artists of color as well. Her Anyone Can Fly Foundation, founded in 1999, aims to “expand the art establishment canon to artists working in the tradition of the African Diaspora (born from 1765-1920) and to introduce those artists and art traditions to kids as well as adult audiences.”(33)

Overcoming the challenges of exclusion and discrimination, Faith Ringgold and Betye Saar were some of the few able to both draw from and help shape the Black Arts and Feminist art movements of the 1960s and 70s.(34) Harnessing their own experiences and fighting for their voices to be heard, Ringgold and Saar helped permeate the restrictive boundaries of race and gender to make space for Black Feminist Power. Meeting on the Matrix emphasizes not only the underseen and undervalued medium of print, but also highlights the ways in which Ringgold and Saar have given voice to the underseen and undervalued in American society from the 1960s to the present. Black women appear in their works as the arbiters of revolutions both large and small, political and personal.