Faith Ringgold

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

Because the mask is your face, the face is a mask, so I'm thinking of the face as a mask because of the way I see faces is coming from an African vision of the mask which is the thing that we carry around with us, it is our presentation, it's our front, it's our face. ”

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 have always wanted to tell my story - or, more to the point, my side of the story. ”

There were people who would complain about their jobs, and my mother would walk away from that job. I liked that a lot about her. She was a very, very creative woman, and eventually, she stopped working outside the house, and she just had her own customers whom she made clothes for. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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

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. ”