* Ooh ooh ooh ooh
* Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh
* La da da da da da da day
* La da da da da day
- When I was a child, I had asthma
and I was home a lot, not going to school.
And I might be home for a week,
recovering from an asthma attack,
but I had all my schoolwork.
My mother would get my books
and find out what my lessons were
so I could keep up with my reading.
My mother often would give me a little scrap of cloth
and I would make something.
When I went to the City College of New York in 1948,
they asked me, "What are you planning to be?"
"Well, if you put it like that, I want to be an artist."
And I was told, "We don't offer that degree to women."
But one woman there said, "Wait a minute.
"You can major in art and minor in education
and be an art teacher."
To be a teacher is a professional job
that is popular among African Americans in the South
because they had segregated schools.
So in my family, that was something that people did,
my great-grandfather being the first, Professor BB Posey.
No matter how you turn it,
you always get those four words in there, huh?
- Mm-hmm, and the nice pattern.
- And the nice pattern.
- Okay, I'll pin it and stitch it and we'll take a look at it.
- Right.
- I met Faith at University of California San Deigo.
I was in Faith's drawing class.
Faith asked if anyone was a photographer in the class,
and I was the only one who raised my hand.
That was 17 years ago.
Right now, we're working on a quilt about President Obama.
- A good way to collaborate on something
is to use this Kuba design from the Belgian Congo.
There's eight triangles in a square,
done in different ways.
It's just wonderful, and you can do all kinds of stuff
and you can have a lot of people collaborate together,
and you just need more units of words
so that you can repeat them,
and there's no limit to how many ways it can be.
It's just such a great design; I love it.
I studied a lot about quilts
because I wanted to understand their origin.
In the United States, the quilt was brought here
by slaves from Africa.
Slaves would make quilts for their master's house
and they could also make quilts for themselves to keep warm,
so it was a useful medium,
but it gave them an opportunity to be decorative
and to use their design aspects.
So the Gee's Bend quilts are a very good example of that.
They put it together not even thinking about design,
but they were creating
these wonderful minimalist arrangements.
I remember when we used to go up on Tar Beach,
which was the roof of our building.
We could reflect and look at all of New York.
The lights, and it was so beautiful.
It looks exactly as it did when I painted it.
Y'know, how I made the tar roof and the way the tablecloth is.
I had this family in mind.
The adults will be playing cards
and the children will be laying on a mattress.
You can't run around on a roof.
Children have to be calm, but you can be very happy
because it's so wonderful.
Looking at the stars and the buildings.
And you can have all kinds of goodies to eat.
Cassie and BB.
They're patterned after people I knew as a child.
BB was a little boy who was just adorable,
and Cassie was a young woman
that I went to City College with.
I wrote a story, and the end of it, when I said,
"I have told BB,"
because BB doesn't know, how do you do all this flying?
"I have told him it's very easy, anyone can fly.
"All you need is somewhere to go
"that you can't get to any other way.
And the next thing you know, you're flying among the stars."
And Judith Leiber, the pocketbook mogul,
she saw it and bought it,
and then she donated it to the Guggenheim.
* L'adore, l'adore
Tar Beach , my first book, came from the story quilt.
They liked the story, so they wanted me to do a book,
and I had already written the words
because the words are on the story quilt.
So they just sent me a dummy book
and put the words on each one of the 32 pages
and I just went back
and illustrated each one of those pages.
My second book, my editor said, "What about Harriet Tubman?"
I said, "Nice, okay."
So now, my job is what about Harriet Tubman?
Then, when I could tell the story of who was Harriet Tubman,
what did she do that was important,
I get my characters.
And then the third thing is the dialogue.
And when I get all that done,
that's my story, that's my process.
[subway rumbling]
When I got the commission to do the subway,
I wanted be in Harlem,
and I said, "I want to be on 125th Street,"
'cause 125th Street was like the center of culture of Harlem.
What made Harlem so famous and important
is the people who lived there and went there,
who built the African-American cultural
and historical significance.
The Theresa Hotel was a fantastic hotel
and meeting place,
and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X came to Harlem.
Actually, Malcolm X, before he even became important,
he lived on my corner.
And a very important place was Abyssinian Baptist Church.
I went there as a child.
I would listen to Adam Clayton Powell talk,
and I think he politicized me.
Made me understand what it was I had to do
as an African American.
And there wasn't any women's movement of any kind.
I mean, he was actually talking to the men,
but so was everybody.
So I just had to, I had to translate.
Y'know, I had to say, "Well, okay, [laughs]
"if this is what the guys should do,
"then what's my role in it?
What do I do?"
And that's why, in my foundation, I am committed
that children should learn about these great masters
of African-American art.
And when you can see yourself in the development of a culture,
you can do it too.
Because it's only through these people
that I knew that I could do it.
'Cause people before me did it.
We really do need those role models.
My goal as a young artist was to get past
male chauvinist domination in the art world.
That's number one, because no matter whether I was
with the African Americans or the white Americans,
I was still a woman,
and women are not supposed to make art.
That kind of double struggle empowers me.
It gives me a reason to move on and to tell that story.
These three were my students way back in the day.
I told the kids,
"All right, we're gonna do this bulletin board
for Black History Week."
So I said, "What are we gonna have on it?"
And so Paula raised her hand and she said,
"Well, I'm gonna bring in my brother's latest book,
Go Tell It on the Mountain ."
And I said, "Well, what's your brother's name?"
And she said, "James Baldwin."
And I didn't know him then.
He must have just started.
- He had, we had, exactly,
because Mountain came out in 1953.
- Faith: All right.
- So we came together in '55. - '55.
And I got that book and I read it.
That was it.
I read everything that James Baldwin wrote.
One right after the other.
And that helped me to change my art.
Because I wanted to do art that expressed
what was happening to African Americans in America today.
- One thing I have to say that I remember about Faith,
is the compassion, the compassion that you had
with all of us in the classroom.
I remember, if I finished, I remember saying, "I'm finished,"
and you said, "No, you're not, you have color.
"Put all the colors in there.
"You have all of the beige or the white at the top.
Let's get the colors in."
And I remember wanting to put those colors in.
But it was the way that you said it.
It was the way that you circulated.
You moved around and you had something to say to each of us.
- My children used to draw on the walls and I framed it.
[all laughing]
My relatives thought I had gone mad.
- Correct, yeah, right. - But I was thrilled about it.
It was thrilled that
these little people could do these things.
And you are a part of all of this.
[jazzy piano music]
- I wanted to create paintings
that could be as large as I needed them to be,
and I needed to be able to roll it up
and place it in a trunk and send it all over the country.
Then, I would go and they would pay me to lecture.
Artists need to be able to store their work,
and the quilts have made that completely possible for me.
The first quilt, "Echoes of Harlem,"
was made with my mother and I.
My mother informed me
that making a quilt was extremely difficult.
When my mother passed away,
the second quilt I wanted to make
was a tribute to Mother.
I sat down and I created "Mother's Quilt."
[jazzy saxophone music]
Sonny Rollins used to come to my house
to practice his saxophone music.
He was a little kid, 12, 13 years old.
He's a year older than me.
And my mother used to say, "Oh, Sonny, please,
"you're disturbing my neighbors,"
'cause he did. [laughs]
He'd blow off-key.
But it didn't upset him.
He taught me to be serious about my art.
I learned that from Sonny Rollins.
And then when he became older and more successful in the '60s,
he would go up on the bridge and nobody could say anything.
So I wanted to remember that, and so I created "Sonny's Quilt"
with Sonny blowing on the bridge.
And I thought, at that time, this personifies women.
Bridges unite people across barriers.
And that's what we do with our families.
We hurdle obstacles.
We stay together.
We pass it on.
Just like a bridge.
- What's special about our school
is that we have this arts focus.
We have a Harlem focus.
We feel like that has a lot to do with the self-esteem
that is built in the students,
and so we try to weave in the arts
into all of our subject areas
because we feel like it enhances learning for the students.
- It was the night of the 24th of December in 1939, woo.
- Faith found me in Harlem.
She was looking for a school to work with
and introduced me to her way of teaching art
and teaching the cultural significance of art,
and all of the artists that the kids don't learn about.
She had this process
where the kids would learn about an artist,
learn about their lives,
and then create art in the style of this artist,
using the same mediums that the artist would use.
And the final component was that
they would go see the work itself.
The original work.
And so once I started doing that with the kids
through a grant that she had
through the Anyone Can Fly Foundation,
I just found that, by the time we finished,
it would be a very rich-looking piece.
- Hello, Miss Ringgold.
It's always been a dream to meet you.
- Oh, thank you, I love that.
- Teacher: He is a very bright student,
but he has severe asthma,
so he wasn't here when we gave out the papers,
but he has been so blessed to bring us our snack today,
so he said this is his lucky day.
- All right.
Well, you know, I have asthma, also.
- Teacher: [gasps] Oh my goodness.
- Yes, I got asthma at two, when I was two years old.
* La la la la
* La la la
I expected to have a problem,
a big problem with making quilts in the fine art world.
But I did not.
* La la la la
Everybody knows what a quilt is.
That was so important in my career as an artist
because it made people accept my work
much better than they did
before I started making the quilts.
* La la la la la la
* La la la