"Yes I Can" Playing Cards & letter to the editor

for sale at Rugers and from Faith

Letter to the NY Times by Faith Ringgold

May 27, 2009

It appears that the New York Times will not be running my letter to the Editor in rebuttal to the NY Times Review "Master of Story Quilts and Much More" By BENJAMIN GENOCCHIO.

Florence Kennedy once told me to, "Write about you're own damn self" so I'm publishing my words, here, myself.

Dear Mr. Genocchio

Your review: Master of Story Quilts and Much More published on May 22 in the New York Region section of the New York Times is (as you wrote about “A Declaration of Independence 50 Years of Art by Faith Ringgold” at the Mason Gross Galleries at Rutgers:) “not perfect.”

For one thing you completely “over looked” everything in the Political Gallery #3, in which the Declaration of Freedom and independence the titled and featured work including: illustrations, texts, story quilt and a portfolio of prints of “The Declaration of Freedom and Independence” are shown in two separate Galleries. And for another thing, there is not even a whisper about the deck of playing cards, titled “Yes I Can” which I created especially for the show, and in tribute to our first black president, Barack Obama, displayed in Jazz Gallery #1. Not to even mention the 13 quilts, paintings and prints of the “Coming to Jones Road Series” in the Jones Road Gallery #6. In which I experience my ancestors travail on the Underground Railroad some 200 years before coming to live in New Jersey myself in 1992.

One would have to see this show themselves to know all you missed. What you do not review somehow speaks much louder than what you do.

Faith Ringgold

5/27/09