Faith Ringgold

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.

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.

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.

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

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