And as life would have it, we stumbled into the exhibit of Faith Ringgold’s work at the DeYoung Museum and found the counterpoint to Sanford Biggers’s work. A survey of Ms. Ringgold’s work, political and personal, included paintings on quilts. One holds up the righteous words of Sojourner Truth, dated 1851 in Akron, Ohio. I must copy them here:

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches and to have the best place everywhere.

Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles or gives me any best place and ain’t I a woman?

Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns and no man could head me. And ain’t I a woman?

I could work as much and eat as much as a man when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman?

I have borne thirteen children and seen most all sold off to slavery and when I cried out with my Mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?…

Then that man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men cause Christ wasn’t a woman!

Where did your Christ come from?
Where did your Christ come from?
From God and a woman!
Man had nothing to do with Him.

I love how in the French Collection, Ringgold places herself in a world in which her alter ego communes with artists and thinkers of all different times.

When I was starting out, I perceived that an artist is apart from others, and, in those days, when life felt long, the feeling was daunting. And then in my decades of teaching, I treated my feelings of artistic solitude by placing pictures of artists in an array around my classroom. Ostensibly it was for my students, but equally it was for myself.

One vacation, years and years ago, I traveled solo to D.C. and went to the Phillips Collection. I had no idea that I was visiting the museum that housed The Boating Party, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. I was stunned to see it. I had no idea of its large scale or that it would affect me. (I don’t really take to the artist’s work generally—some of his portraits of women are all sweetness and sticky smear.) But I was hit by the poignant moment this painting captured. The carefree sense of their youth and the pleasure of the day floated warmly off the canvas—and equally the knowledge that all of these people were long gone. The only memory of that moment of joy was right there in that room.

After I got home, I was looking at a reproduction and perceived that there was an empty place at the table. Maybe Renoir himself had risen to take a photograph. So I placed myself there.

Cover Image: Faith Ringgold, Dinner at Gertrude Stein’s (detail)