Faith Ringgold

“I don't think you can create art out of anger; it has to come out of some form of understanding. You have to feel good about who you are and that you could do something to change things.”

“Here I come with these images of black and white people, and a lot of people got angry at me.”

“Art is a form of experience of the person, the place, the history of the people, and as black people, we are different. We hail from Africa to America, so the culture is mixed, from the African to the American. We can't drop that. It's reflected in the music, the dance, the poetry, and the art.”

“I can recall that nobody ever went out the door that wasn't dressed nicely, even though it was the Depression. I particularly remember on Sunday, the day we all went to church, if you didn't have it together, you kind of stayed in the house.”

“I guess I had fun doing it but it has hard memories for me.”

“The reason why I began making quilts is because I wrote my autobiography in 1980 and couldn't get it published because I wanted to tell my story, and my story didn't appear to be appropriate for African-American women.”

“There were a lot of stop signs in my life... People telling you what to do, when to do it, and so on.”

“I was functioning in a time when people were struggling, and they knew they had to struggle, and I was a part of that struggle. It wasn't just women.”

“I think I had struck on a combination of imagery and politics that worked.”

“I had this idea that I wanted to do this mixture of visions of African American women and visions of African American men. And call it 'The Men' and call it 'The Women' and show different faces of these two people.”

“I'm not so presumptuous to feel that they're gonna get it right away, get exactly what I have in mind. I hope that they'll enjoy looking at it at any rate, whatever it is. And that's why I started writing stories on my work.”

“What has not changed is people are still doing whatever they think they can get away with. I think there's still a lot of advancement for people, generally speaking, to learn to let other people live in the world with freedom.”

“Paintings, people really don't understand... They don't really get paintings. Quilts they do understand because everybody has a quilt in their house.”

“I had something I was trying to say and sometimes the message is an easy transmission and sometimes it's a difficult one but I love the power of saying it so I'm gonna do it whether it's hard or easy.”

“I just feel like I'm the luckiest person in the world being able to do what I love and be able to do it all day every day if I like, you know, I mean it's great, I love it.”

“Every time people struggle, they survive, they do better, and then they forget, and they end up back where they started from.”

“I think all children love art, but not all get the opportunity to do it.”

“I think that has been a benefit to me because I think most people understand quilts and not a lot of people understand paintings. But yet they're looking at one.”

“I am free to go wherever I want for the rest of my life.”

“Children are so talented. Little children, until about the age of 10 or 11, are just little artists. They need to be given the time and the space and the materials to do their work. That's all they need.”