The Women: Mask Face Quilt #1
Faith Ringgold
New York, New York, 1986
Cotton; painted and machine pieced
Ardis and Robert James Collection
1997.007.1082

Faith Ringgold is an artist perhaps best known for her story quilts, one of which, “Tar Beach,” was transformed into a famous and highly praised children’s book. A painter whose work, especially in the 1960s and ‘70s, depicted and decried racism in America, Ringgold made her first painted story quilt in 1980 as a collaboration with her fashion-designer mother. “Mask Face Quilt #1: The Women” and its partner, “Mask Face Quilt #2: The Men,” depict a range of Black faces placed in a grid that almost resembles a mix-and-match game board. About these quilts, Ringgold said, “"Because the mask is your face, the face is a mask, so I'm thinking of the face as a mask because of the way I see faces is coming from an African vision of the mask which is the thing that we carry around with us, it is our presentation, it's our front, it's our face.”