Story Quilt Transcript

• Change: Faith Ringgold’s Over 100 Pounds Weight Loss Performance Story Quilt, 1986

  Photoetching on silk and cotton with printed and pieced fabric
  Richard and Ellen Sandor Family Collection

   

  Change: Faith Ringgold’s Over 100 Pounds Weight Loss Story Quilt

  January 1, 1986

  In this year, 1986, I will lose 128 pounds. By January 1, 1987, I will weigh 130 pounds, or I’ll eat your hat. Min I’ve already eaten. Faith you will have been trying to lose weight since the sixties. For the last twenty, twenty-five years you’ve been putting yourself on diets, charting you lack of progress and gaining weight. For the next six moths you’ll be in California, away from everybody, the perfect place to make the CHANGE.

  You always lose weight when you’re away from them. They lose weight when you’re away from them too. There’s a message in this. Never mind—you just know what you need. Peace of cake—I mean mind. It’s as simple as that. Aggravation makes you hungry. You are over controlling. Admit it! You took the test and passed—high. But you can CHANGE that too. Mommy can exchange her 100 pound burden for some peace and a life of her own. Whatever it takes to do it. It’s a first place pre-ority—I mean priority.

  Use art to document the CHANGE: this quilt, a performance and a video of the entire weight loss process. Now you tell me how you’re going to explain not losing weight this time? I’ll say, “Well you see, there was a cute little pig moved in next door. Used to come over all cooked, ready to eat. I couldn’t keep my hands off his ribs.” No Faith—there are no excuses. You can’t gain it back. We’re talking total change this time: good nutrition, behavior modification, daily exercise, and hunger.

  I know you don‘t want to admit it. When it comes to food you lack self-esteem. Like everything else you probably ate it, and can’t remember what it tasted like. Let’s face it. You’re quite good at eating large portions of food, gaining weight and talking to yourself about it. Well, the eating of large portions of food and the weight gain is over. But can we talk? Yes. I am out to prove something right here and now. I can CHANGE. I can do it. I can do it. I can CHANGE. I can CHANGE NOW.

   

  1930–1939

  In the 1930s folks had fried chicken and greens for Sunday dinner, and fried fish and potato salad on Friday. Your family had leg. Of mutton on Sunday, and fried fish on Saturday. Fried fish was the only food your mother fried when you were a kid ‘cause nobody ever heard of porgies cooked any other way. Because you had asthma and were allergic, you were on a health food diet of steamed vegetables, fresh fruit, lamb, chicken, veal, skimmed milk, corn meal gruel, and homemade lemon ice cream made with skimmed milk that tasted awful.

  Your mother never allowed you to eat between meals. The kitchen was closed every evening after supper till breakfast the next morning. Years later you developed a fascination for late night eating by the light of the open refrigerator door. You thought those calories didn’t count. But what about the tell-tale evidence they left behind and in front?

  Exercise was part of the day’s work for your mother; you were up before dawn in the norming; bathed, dressed, and out in the street; then back for lunch and a nap; out again, back for dinner and in bed before sundown. Vacations were spent on the beach in Atlantic City. But mother’s schedule was unchanged. While you were napping you could hear her snapping her fingers and dancing to William B. Williams radio program “It’s Make Believe Ballroom Time” while she did her housework. That was her aerobic exercise, and it took you all these years to figure that out.

  [The following is a guide to overlapping photographs to the right of the text panel:
  1. Faith 1931; 2. With Barbara 1937; 3. With Barbara at World’s Fair 1939; 4. With Barbara and Andrew 1931; 5. With Barbara and Andrew 1931; 6. On Beach in Atlantic City 1938; 7. With Mother 1934; 8. In buggy 1931; 9. With Andrew and Barbara at 3 year old birthday, 1938; 10. With Andrew on boardwalk in Atlantic City 1936; 11. With Barbara and Andrew 1937; 12. With Mother and Barbara (in sand) in Atlantic City 1934; 13. With Andrew and Barbara 1936; 14. Faith 1937; 15. With Barbara and Andrew, Orange NJ 1931; 16. With Andrew and Barbara in snow 1932; 17. With Barbara on beach in Atlantic City 1938. Photo credits: DeLaigle Studios.]

   

  1940–1949

  By the 1940s we all had to clean up our plates for the starving children. That of course was right up your alley since you never left anything anyway. It was in those years that you discovered chocolate candy bars. They were a nickel then and as big as the ones that cost 50 cents today. All you really thought about in those years were chocolate candy bars, boys, make-up, and clothes.

  Actually, you never really pursued your chocolate addiction past your teens, except for the time you thought of making chocolate candy as a business. You found it’s quite easy to make chocolate candy, and even easier to eat it all.

  It’s lucky for you that you never learned to make pastry. The few times you tried it, the results were more useful as bricks you could throw in a real pastry show window. Some people would call that a sacrilege, and give you two to four years time. But you wouldn’t have minded if you could do it in a bakery. Some ideas are so bad you wonder how you entertained them even for a minute—like the one you had about making all your pastries so that you would at least have good nutrition. You made a pound cake that weighed more than you did. Industrial strength pound cake. You needed a saw to cut it. And you ate it. You had to steam it first, but you ate it.

  [The following is a guide to overlapping photographs to the left of the text panel:
  1. Mother, Barbara, S Husband, Jo Jo, and Faith on Easter 1949; 2. Faith 1947; 3. With Freda and Jimmy; 4. In 1948; 5. On boardwalk in Atlantic City, 194?; 6. With Bernice and Barbara in Atlantic City 194?; 9. Faith and Earl Wallace (married in him Nov. of 1950); 10. On day of graduation from high school June 1948; 11. Barbara, Mother and Faith 1948. Photo credits: DeLaigle Studios.]

   

  1950–1959

  Women in the 1950s had to get married to leave home. Barbara was married first. Her wedding was beautiful; however, both of your marriages were terrible mistakes. You were still in college when you and your two daughters moved in with your mother after you divorce. All through the 1950s you were scantily dressed in tight, revealing dresses with matching 3-inch heels, a size too small; and you often amazed onlookers by falling down whole flights of stairs without injury.

  You also modeled for your mother in her many fashion shows, and was her master of ceremonies which was more appealing to you. Being a model seemed an unnatural thing to do. You were a connoisseur of pork chop sandwiches—that was natural for you. Birdie (your soon to be second husband) often brought you a pork chop sandwich and some tutti frutti ice cream made from whole milk and cream when he came to call. That was love.

  Pork chop sandwiches cost 75 cents. The were greasy and fried—better than steak. A date was to go to the movies or a concert or a dance and then to dinner at Sherman’s Barbeque or the Red Rooster on 7th Avenue for fried chicken and a drink. The next day after a date you were always sick with asthma. As a matter of fact, many times you got asthma before the date and had to go to the hospital instead; or you went out and got asthma on the way home and had to be carried upstairs. That was romance in the 1960s.

  [The following is a guide to overlapping photographs to the right of the text panel:
  1. Barbara’s wedding: top row, Andrew Jr. second from left, Andrew Sr. (Daddy) far right. Middle row, Faith, third from left, Barbara, fourth from left. Cheryle, Andrew’s baby, front center. 1950; 2. Faith modeling 1956; 3. Graduation MA degree. CCNY 1959; 4. With mother rehearsing for role as MC at fashion show 1950; 5. (Baby) Barbara with Faith and both grandmothers and paternal grand aunt. 1953; 6. Faith with (Baby) Michele 1952; 7. Faith modeling, 1956. Photo credits: George Hopkins.]

   

  1960–1969

  In 1961 you discovered French bread and cheese, and wine with your meats in Europe, though you were brough tup to believe that people who drank wine were winos. The French, however, carried their wine well—that is, everywhere—they drank it like water. In Italy you acquired a refined taste for pasta, veal parmigiana, olive oil, and more wine. Café dining on the Via Veneto in Rome stimulated your palette and enlarged your waistline. Eating was fun but it was also therapeutic.

  In the 1960s you found a lot of things to eat about. You were married again, had two teenaged daughters, developed a mature style of political art, began looking for a gallery, found one on 57th Street, and had your first one-person show. It was then that you began promising to lose weight. Pork was now a political issue. Baby don’t eat no pig, it’ll kill you!” the brothers said. But you did.

  By now you were having wine with your pork chops and bread and cheese with your ribs. You had a doctor on West 56th Street that would dispense weight-loss pills by the week. Soon you stopped losing weight. You didn’t know you were supposed to increase the dosage in order to get the same effect. You increased eating instead and gained back all the weight you lost.

  [The following is a guide to overlapping photographs to the left of the text panel:
  1. Faith modeling probably for the last time 1965; 2. At wedding to Burdette—Michele, Burdette, Faith, Roy (best man), Barbara, Barbara (sister and daughter) 1962; 3. With Burdette 1962; 4. With mother, Barbara and Michele on S.S. Liberté enroute to Paris 1961; 5. Michele, Faith, Barbara and Mother enroute to Europe (without me) 1967; 6. In Studio 1968. Photo credits: George Hopkins.]

   

  1970–1979

  In the 1970s food was a feminist issue and you were a fat feminist. Always looking for a quasi-politically correct reason to eat. And of course you found plenty of them. In the sixties it was being a wife and mother, the rejection of being a Black artist and other oppressions. In the seventies it was all that and being a woman too.

  You didn’t have to eat over that. You didn’t solve anything by having two dinners at one meal, and don’t blame anybody. You used to say your husband, Burdette, made you eat so that no one else would look at you. And then you didn’t look at you either. You used to say you never served leftovers because your family hated them. Your family never saw anything they left over. You’d eat it all up while you were washing the dishes. You were so embarrassed that day when you entered a midtown restaurant eating cookies. “I’ll be back,” the waiter said, “when you finish eating.”

  Remember the time you showed up at a benefit exhibition for an uptight political candidate? You posed with her not realizing you held a greasy bag of nuts. She slapped you on your hand and ordered you to “put that away.” At that moment you had the attention of several news media. You could have made the front page and the Nightly News that day, “Fat Woman Goes Nuts;” but you smiled, wiped your mouth, and put your nuts out of sight. Your clothes were no longer fashionable or fun, but a cover-up. One fall, you forgot to cover your knees from the early cold. You had pain in your knees so bad you could hardly walk. The pain travelled to your so that you had to crawl twisted and wincing to the doctor’s office. “Lose weight,” he said. Doctors are good at telling you to lose weight and how much to pay the nurse. What they don’t tell you is—How?

  [The following is a guide to overlapping photographs to the right of the text panel:
  1. Mother and Faith viewing collaborative piece at 10-year retro. 1973; in studio 1972; 3. In performance 1977; 4. At installation or morah at Women’s House of Detention Rikers Island 1972; 5. In audience of panel on women artists over 70 at Brooklyn Museum 1975; 6. In studio 1978. Photo credits: 1. R. Costello, Home News; 2. George Hopkins; 3. Barbara T. Wenders; 4. Rufus Hinton; 5. Carin Droohster Marx; 6. Ellie Thompson.]

   

  1980–1985

  By the 1980s you had finally eaten yourself into a corner. The only way out was cold turkey without dressing. The wine with your meals at a nice restaurant had escalated to a barefoot binge before the TV. You tried a program of group therapy that met in different women’s homes. One day ten or fifteen of you 200-pounders-plus were sitting on straining chairs when the aroma of a serious pot cooking in the kitchen met your collective noses. You had visions of a mad rush to the door in which several women mangled while others of heavier poundage stampeded to the kitchen and literally ate it—pots all. You never went back. Over-eaters are not necessarily compatible. You found yourself sitting in the same room talking about your personal life with women you’d disagree with on every issue except pork. You needed special help.

  The only problem you could solve was what to eat. For a while you were on a beans and rice diet. People have a way of knowing when you’ve made that choice. You didn’t lose any weight, but you did lose a few overly sensitive friends. Remember when you bought a 30 dollar bottle of cognac because the salesman thought you were Nell Carter of “Gimme a Break”? You actually asked for brandy but he heard cognac, and you couldn’t make her look cheap so you bought it. Now you can’t stand brandy and you can’t afford cognac. Then you heard Nell Carter was losing weight on a pasta diet. So, to keep “your” identity intact, you went on a pasta diet—all you can eat. In order to surprise yourself with a dramatic weight loss, you stayed off the scale for weeks. You gained 12 pounds on that diet. Surprised?

  It was now time for a CHANGE. No more gimmicky diets. Let your body tell you what you need. After all that pasta you needed protein so you went on a fried chicken meal plan. It was health, as you recall, since the chicken was fried in corn oil. This time you tipped the scale at a whopping 258 pounds, and broke it. The scale was tired. That same day, Baby Faith came running out of your room screaming, “Granma your scale says I weight 258 pounds.” It is time for a CHANGE.

  [The following is a guide to overlapping photographs to the left of the text panel:
  1. Faith at Wooster College 1985; 2. In performance 1984; 3. Directing performance at Wooster College; 4. In political dress (made by Marquetta Johnson) 1984; 5. With Michele in 1980; 6. With Barbara and Burdette at Barbara’s graduation at CUNY 1981; 7. With Baby Faith and Woman on a Pedestal Sculpture; 8. At Artists Against Apartheid press conference 1984. Photo credits: 2. Tom Ferentz; 1, 3 Wooster College P.R.; 4. Peter Bellamy; 7. Fern Logan; 8. Beauford Smith.]

   

  October 1986 (Jan–Oct)

  The worst part of being fat was squeezing yourself sideways through the subway turnstile: hobbling down the stairs to the train in hopes that it would still be there when you finally arrive, and that you would be lucky enough to find two seats. Together. It is difficult to change a lifetime of indulgence but there are some things you have learned. One is that you cannot eat meat. If you do you will want to have the gravy over some rice, some cake to neutralize the taste, some ice cream over that, and then the whole kitchen. Instead you must look for the lite label on foods you buy. Industrial strength is for cleaning.

  But still, if somebody would offer a surrogate jogger, you would sit there on the beach in California or the park bench in New York City and applaud them as they run your lazy bones by, knowing you’d get the benefits. That would be a real high. Stay away also from people and situations that send you off the wall and straight into the refrigerator.

  It is September 27, 1986, and though I have 40 pounds yet to lose I have lost 88 pounds. Today I am thinner than I have been in the last twenty years. I eat fresh fruit and vegetable sin stead of pasta and pork chops, and I exercise almost every day. I am out to prove something right here and now. I can CHANGE. I can do it. I can do it. I can CHANGE. I can CHANGE NOW.

  [The following is a guide to overlapping photographs above the text panel:
  1. Faith, September 28; 2. In the Spring; 3. With Burdette, Sept; 4. With Baby Faith, Baby Teddy, and Barbara; 5. In October; 6. On January 27 (beginning of weight loss program); 7. With Baby Faith and Burdette in September; 8. In September; 9. Received Honorary Doctor of Fine Art, Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, PA, June; 10. In front of The Purple Quilt, October. Photo credits: 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, C. LOVE; 5, 10, Clarissa Slight; 6. Lifetime Health and Nutrition Center, San Diego, CA; 2, UCSD student.]

   

  Photo etching plates by Van Allyn Graphics, NYC. Printing by Lynn Rogan and Julie Amario of the Printmaking Workshop, NYC. Editing by Lisa Yi. Faith Ringgold © 1986 NYC.