Politics & Power Quote by Faith Ringgold

Ringgold is describing an artistic move that sounds almost disarmingly simple: split the world into “The Men” and “The Women,” then fill each category with “different faces.” The plainness is the point. She’s borrowing the blunt grammar of sociology and stereotype - those capital-letter groups America loves to talk about as if they’re singular, fixed types - and then setting a trap for it. You come in expecting an essence; she delivers multiplicity.

The phrase “mixture of visions” matters. Ringgold isn’t claiming documentary authority; she’s naming subjectivity. “Visions” signals imagination, memory, projection, desire - the whole messy apparatus through which Black Americans are so often pictured by others. By foregrounding her own seeing, she reclaims the right to construct Black images without apologizing for narrative, symbolism, or exaggeration. That’s consistent with her broader practice: quilts and painted story-scenes that treat everyday Black life as worthy of epic framing, not just ethnographic recording.

Contextually, Ringgold emerges from a post-civil-rights art world that still gatekept Black representation, especially women’s. The split into men and women also nudges at an internal conversation: gender politics inside Black freedom movements, the way “the race” has historically been gendered male in public rhetoric, while Black women’s labor and leadership get treated as background. “Different faces” is a refusal of the single spokesperson, the single victim, the single hero. It’s an insistence that Black identity, like any identity, is crowded - and that the crowd is the story.