Talk:Faith Ringgold

December 10, 2015 major edit

Improved all sections of the article and included many new references. These edits were made by users YellowIncandescent, Yogurtnik, and Mariting for an art history project at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Our professor is user SBeetham. YellowIncandescent (talk) 23:39, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Students edited this page after extensive research as part of my course, "Women in American Art." Their changes went through several drafts and I approved the final version. For more information about the course, please see my user page. Sbeetham (talk) 15:50, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Some proposed changes and a question

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I plan to consolidate material on Ringgold's French Collection to the section on quilts and add additional detail. I will also add some discussion of her Feminist series to this section, which is a specific example of work inspired by the Nepali paintings/thangka mentioned in the article (I have already edited that mention in order to reflect that, in the cited source, they are listed as Tibetan and Nepali paintings). I have already changed the targeted section subheading to Quilts and other textiles to reflect the fact that Ringgold engaged with a wider range of textile/fiber arts beyond quilts, as indicated by the content in that subsection. I was inspired to do this work in part by Ringgold's recent death, and in order to revisit the editing of Wikipedia while students in my Art since 1945 class are engaged in this work, so that the process is fresh in my mind as I help them with their own edits.

I plan to use the following sources in support of these additions:

Cameron, Dan, ed. Dancing at the Louvre: Faith Ringgold's French Collection and Other Story Quilts. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998.

• This source (a scholarly publication that accompanied an exhibition) focuses on Ringgold's French Collection and other Story Quilts.

Farrington, Lisa E. Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists. Oxford University Press, 2005.

• This source (a peer-reviewed scholarly book published by a University Press) situates Ringgold's work alongside that of other black women artists engaged in the feminist movement. It discusses her shift away from an exclusive focus on black liberation to an emphasis on women's art and issues, including through an engagement with textile designs and materials. It includes discussion of some of her earliest direct use of textile/fiber media in her Feminist series of 1972, as well as later quilts like The French Collection series.

If I have additional time, I may attempt to flesh out the lead (which is indicated as desirable).

I'm also wondering about the nature of the unlinked numbers that are next to some of the citations. Are these remnants from older edits that should be removed, citations that haven't been properly linked, or source information (like page numbers) that should be moved into the reference info? Kbrion (talk) 19:23, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

The unlinked numbers are usually page numbers. It seems that the reference/citation style on this page has been mixed over the years. I would say this page needs to be consistent in its citation style, and I would personally argue for shortened citations because a figure like Ringgold's article will require a good amount of print citations that are used multiple times at different pages. The page number citations you're talking about are a form of "shortened footnotes" that gets around the issue of gumming up an article with dozens of repeated citations to a specific text across different pages of that text (i.e., you don't have to completely re-cite a book multiple times to different pages, which adds a bunch of HTML to the article). Ringgold's article is likely to grow in length, detail, and number of references over the next few years (she is inarguably one of the most important American artists of the 20th century), so I personally think this article should retain the shortened citations, possibly in a different style. I generally prefer the Template:Sfnp style. --19h00s (talk) 19:55, 16 April 2024 (UTC)