Art Analysis: Faith Ringgold's Art

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Description Faith Ringgold’s art displays a nighttime scene of a group of African American adults and children. In the middle of this piece, there is four adults sitting at a square table. They are each sitting in different types of chairs. There is two women and two men at this table. Off to the back right of this table is another table with a blue table cloth. It appears that food and drinks are housed on top of this table with a basket of food underneath. Next to the table is also a pallet with two young African American children laying on their backs side by side. The bigger one is a girl, and the smaller one is a boy. The girl is wearing a white dress with pink/red details. The boy is wearing light blue and yellow pajamas. His socks are
The dominant line in this piece of art would have to be a straight line. To be precise, the vertical straight line is a vivid piece to this art. Within the art, you can also see shapes such as squares and rectangles. These four sided shapes are found in many different aspects of the artwork. For example, the buildings in the background are rectangles, and the border is full of rectangles and squares. The form of this art is clearly 2D, considering it is on canvas. Although, Ringgold did an amazing job at portraying a sense of 3D degression. The texture of this art is considered to be rough and clothlike. This is due to the fact that “Ringgold’s vehicle is the story quilt” within this work of art. (Spector, Nancy.) The space of this art could be described as busy. There is something new in each square of the quilt. There is also a large value change if you compare the inner middle of the artwork to the surrounding edges of it. The core of this piece of art is dark while the outside is light. The type of balance would be considered asymmetrical. There is also not a distinct pattern in this piece. Another detail to this artwork is that everything is in proportion. The only rhythm and movement found is the young girl in the sky looks as if she is flying. A strong contrast found is, again, the bright floral border compared to the dark picture inside. The pieces of this piece are bold and do not work together because they highly
My favorite thing about this piece is the depiction of the New York skyline during a starry night. This is because I am in love with the city at night time. It makes me feel warm. My least favorite thing is the floral border. At first glance, it looks dumb and out of place. I did not understand the purpose of this border until further research was done on the piece of art. I do not think the artist was successful at achieving her goal. I think this because at first I didn't even notice the young girl flying above the bridge. Once I noticed her, I could not tell she was the same girl laying on the rooftop. This made the wild background not make much sense to me. If I were to do something differently about this piece, I would make the flying girl bigger, or put her into more of the focus. Also, I would do something special to show that they are the same girl. Maybe a unique outfit or something would do the job. During the time this artwork was created, Ringgold played a role in the organization of protests and actions against museums that did not show the work of women and people of color. She usually used “overly political paintings” to present her anger (Spector, Nancy). Within this work, she used a story quilt. Everyone loved it! She turned down her angry theme to show this light hearted example of a “spirited heroine”(Spector, Nancy). Women in this time period’s society loved to see a young colored girl

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