Monday January 15th, 2024
7:00PM-8:30PM
Faith Ringgold, born 1930 in Harlem, New York, is a painter, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, writer, teacher and lecturer. She received her B.S. and M.A. degrees in visual art from the City College of New York in 1955 and 1959. Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of California in San Diego, she created her first political paintings, The American People series from 1963 to 1967 and had her first and second one-person exhibitions at the Spectrum Gallery in New York. Ringgold began making tankas (inspired by a Tibetan art form of paintings framed in richly brocaded fabrics), soft sculptures and masks in the early 1970s. She later utilized this medium in her masked performances of the 1970’s and 80’s. Ringgold made her first quilt, Echoes of Harlem, in 1980 as a part of a collaboration with her mother, Madame Willi Posey. These quilts were an extension of the tankas she created the decade prior. However, these paintings were not only bordered with fabric but quilted, creating a unique way of painting using the quilt medium.
Ringgold’s first story quilt Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima? was written in 1983 as a way of publishing her unedited writing. The addition of text to her quilts has developed into a unique medium and style all her own. Crown Publishers published Ringgold’s first book, the award winning Tar Beach in 1991. It has won over 20 awards including the Caldecott Honor and the Coretta Scott King award for the best-illustrated children’s book of 1991. The book is based on the story quilt of the same title from The Woman on a Bridge series from 1988. The original painted story quilt, Tar Beach, is in the permanent collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. In 1993, Hyperion Books published Dinner at Aunt Connie’s, her third book based on The Dinner Quilt from 1986. To date she has illustrated 17 children’s books. Ringgold has been represented worldwide exclusively by ACA Galleries since 1995.
Nancy Azara is an artist and feminist educator best known for her large-scale wood sculptures and mixed media collages. She earned her B.S. from Empire State College in 1974. Azara developed and continues to work in a distinct style of sculpture - found wood, carved, ornamented and mounted. Instinctive chip carving peels off an outer layer of wood, reaching for an essentialized raw experience of the body, of the limbs, exposing flesh and blood. This method of art-making explores life cycles, utilizing the metaphor of tree for personhood. Visual hallmarks of Azara's work include, but are not limited to the following features; egg tempera, often in reds and pinks, and aluminum, palladium, gold gilding recovering these exposed layers, exploration folkloric stories of women’s roles, goddess imagery, ancient symbols, mystic spiritual traditions and the affirmation of female self.
Azara continues to make and exhibit work from her studios in Tribeca and Woodstock. She is constantly challenging herself and her community in quarterly intergenerational feminist dialogues, (RE)PRESENT, an outgrowth of NYFAI, The New York Feminist Art Institute, a school she co-founded in 1979. Here, Azara formalized automatic journal drawing for a class she taught, entitled "Visual Diaries, Consciousness Raising Workshop" as a way to access the unconscious. This method quickly became popular as a feminist consciousness-raising technique and was embraced in the nascent feminist art community in New York and with groups like Redstockings.