A Family Portrait: The American Collection #2
1997
Acrylic on canvas with painted and pieced fabric

Ringgold’s most celebrated and best-known body of work, portray narratives that are either fictional or autobiographical, addressing themes specific to the Black female experience while paying homage to the historical tradition of Black female quilters.

The American Collection continues the narrative of Ringgold’s preceding series, The French Collection, executed in 1992. The French Collection tells the story of the fictional Willa Marie Simone and her descendants. Ringgold based the character of Willa Marie Simone on her mother, Mme. Willi Posey, as well as herself. In The French Collection, Simone travels to France in 1920 at the age of sixteen and marries a wealthy white American expatriate who dies soon after she gives birth to two children, Marlena and Pierrot. The American Collection centers on Marlena, now an adult and a successful artist living in the United States, and each quilt is intended to be understood as one of her paintings. Ringgold’s daughter, the writer Michele Wallace, explains that Marlena “should be regarded as a doppelganger for Faith, living and working in roughly the same time frame but more successful, possibly because she has no husband and children.”

A Family Portrait depicts Marlena and Pierrot with their Aunt Melissa, who in The French Collection is explained to have given Marlena’s mother Willa Marie Simone the money to travel to France. Wallace explains the narrative:

A Family Portrait includes Aunt Melissa seated in an armchair holding Marlena and Pierrot as children, in front of two portraits of Willa Marie and her French husband. The family is obviously multiracial, not only because Willa Marie’s husband has white skin and blond hair but also because Pierrot, who can pass for white and sometimes does, is of similar coloration. Biracial blond male children often appear in Faith’s work, perhaps inspired by her husband, Burdette, who had very light skin and blond hair as a child. Although Burdette was African American on both sides, according to the DNA test I encouraged him to take, he was actually more than 50 percent European. … One thing is for sure: we are in the habit of identifying people by the way they look. And another thing is certain: you can’t tell much about a person’s genealogy from looking at them. This is part of what Faith was pointing out in making Pierrot and Marlena, who are siblings, different colors.