Faith Ringgold at WAM

The Worcester Art Museum‘s current exhibit of Faith Ringgold‘s work, Freedom to Say What I Please is small but powerful. Included are her posters, paintings, prints, and a quilt-illustration from her beloved book, Tar Beach. Ringgold is 93 and still working, and the strength of her vision through the decades is arresting. These life-size soft sculptures are “Bessie and Faith” from her Family of Women Series (1974), reminders to the art world of the time to include more women artists, instead of merely representations of women. These two figures represent the artist’s Aunt Bessie alongside Ringgold’s self-portrait, and are inspired by carved wood masks from the Dan people of Liberia.

Lured by the prospect of finding other women artists at WAM, I went on a treasure hunt. Judith Leyster, Gabriele Münter, Maria Marc, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and the mighty Käthe Kollwicz are represented in the permanent galleries. Kollwicz’s sculpture Mother with Child Over Her Shoulder (below) was cast in bronze almost 50 years after the artist’s death. Her sculptures are thankfully beginning to be better known.

Freedom to Say What I Please is up until March 17, and has an accompanying reading room stocked with Ringgold’s childrens’ books.

Changing a studio practice

I am always wary of calling the work I do a “practice.” The word when applied to an artist’s life in the studio sounds self-important, a 90s-pretentious label which attempts to equate visual artists with—who, exactly? Lawyers, doctors, psychiatrists, philosophers?

So let’s just say that I’m changing the way I work in the studio now to be more environmentally friendly. It’s been difficult. For the first three decades of my working life I modeled representational subjects in clay—usually terra cotta but sometimes white stoneware. I love clay, and use low fire clays in case I wanted to direct-fire sketches or small pieces. I made molds on the clay original, almost always out of polyurethane latex or silicone. Then, I used to cast a polyurethane resin (hard plastic) or wax positive in the mold. The resin pieces I painted or patinaed, the waxes went to the bronze foundry. Everything was made of plastic, even brown casting wax which is made from petrochemicals.

I’ve tried many other materials—paper clay, papier maché I made by endlessly boiling waste paper pulp, fabrics, plaster, cement. I’m aware that cement manufacturing is the world’s third-largest contributor to air pollution,  and high-grade molding plaster is not biodegradable. Do I settle for the lesser of many evils? And what about the hand-eye coordination, the knowledge of different clay bodies and how they behave in my studio, all the experience I’ve built up over the decades—what to do? To say nothing of the joy I find working with clay, its responsiveness, and the way it can form a painterly texture of its own when handled the right way. Papier maché didn’t really cut it (too lumpy and unpredictable for small areas). I found paper clay to have a disgruntling working texture–it tears and shreds as I push and pull and carve.

So my newest piece is made from repurposed fabric and needle felting over a chickenwire frame. I’m using a lot of skills that I haven’t necessarily to put to use in sculpture before. I like working with fabric yarn, and notions, and am approaching this piece as though I were making a stuffed animal over a frame, with embellishments. It won’t ever be the same as my old work, so the question remains—can I live with it? Will I like it? Will it be an effective piece? I’m eager to find out.