Top 36 Quotes & Sayings by Faith Ringgold

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

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.

Black women have never embraced feminism. They didn't embrace it in the '50s and '60s; they're not embracing it now. That's not new. I think it's a tendency among women in general not to be supportive of each other.

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 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.

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 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'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.

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.

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.

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.

It is so sad that it takes so long for people to understand what needs to happen in order to be free.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Different people were complaining, and I remember saying, 'Why don't we just demonstrate?' The Whitney was the first.

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 became a feminist because I wanted to help my daughters, other women and myself aspire to something more than a place behind a good man.

Anyone can fly. All you need is somewhere to go that you can't get to any other way. The next thing you know, you're flying among the stars.

Less is even less, and more is still not quite enough.

I'm not presumptuous enough to feel that people are going to feel what I have in mind, so I tell a story, you know, let them read something, that doesn't change, that as I have said it, you know, so that's the way I feel about the viewer, the viewer has a mind of their own and eyes of their own and they're going to see it their way, I just hope they look.

The great enemy of creativity is fear. When we're fearful, we freeze up - like a nine-year-old who won't draw pictures, for fear everybody will laugh. Creativity has a lot to do with a willingness to take risks. Think about how children play. They run around the playground, they trip, they fall, they get up and run some more. They believe everything will be all right. They feel capable; they let go. Good businesspeople behave in a similar way: they lose $15 million, gain $20 million, lose $30 million and earn it back. If that isn't playing, I don't know what is!

I always knew I wanted to be somebody. I think that's where it begins. People decide, "I want to be somebody. I want to make a contribution. I want to leave my mark here." Then different factors contribute to how you will do that.

You can't sit around and wait for somebody to say who you are. You need to write it and paint it and do it

No other creative field is as closed to those who are not white and male as is the visual arts. After I decided to be an artist, the first thing that I had to believe was that I, a black woman, could penetrate the art scene, and that, further, I could do so without sacrificing one iota of my blackness or my femaleness or my humanity.

Creativity helps us realize that we don't have to understand everything. We can enjoy something -feel it and use it- without ever fully comprehending it.

When they're looking at my work, they're looking at a painting and they're able to accept it better because it is also a quilt.

I will always remember when the stars fell down around me and lifted me up above the George Washington Bridge.