Image Obsesses Ringgold

"Faith Ringgold: A Twenty-Five Year Survey," (until Feb. 28) and "Paintings and Drawings by Mary Henry" (until Feb. 14) at the Tacoma Art Museum, 1123 Pacific Avenue, Tacoma. Museum hours 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday (Thursday until 7 p.m., 12 noon to 5 p.m. on Sundays (206-272-4258).

Is Faith Ringgold the Oprah Winfrey of American art? At the Tacoma Art Museum, the final stop of her national touring retrospective exhibition, one huge five-by-six-foot quilt is called "Change: Faith Ringgold's Over 100 Pound Weight Loss Story Quilt." As if to prove the point, the catalog cover sports no fewer than five photographs of the Harlem-born artist.

Like Oprah, Ringgold is obsessed with her image but more believable when dealing with other people's misfortunes. In this raucously crowded installation, her soft sculptures, paintings and quilts display Ringgold's pioneering role in contemporary African-American art.

When treating the powerful history of her race in the U.S. - athletes, musicians, writers - she is eloquent and somber. When appending elaborate written commentaries or diary excerpts to the quilt-paintings, she is tendentious and self-absorbed. Political sincerity or outrage at injustice have never been guarantees of artistic quality.

Prying away the layers of ego, viewers will find an honest and passionate creator. Anger hangs in the air near the "Slave Rape" paintings, including one of a nude black woman wielding an ax.

"United States of Attica" may have been a genuine response to prison conditions in 1971; today it looks like cheap propaganda. A red-and-green map of America annotates geographical sites of injustice. Genitalia are prominent in "Zora and Fish" and elsewhere; parental guidance is advised.

When Ringgold celebrates her heritage, jewel-like colors and a strong sense of community emerge. When she becomes personal or diaristic, as in "Weight Loss," and audience beyond dieting feminists may be lost as well.

Far better, the "Woman on a Bridge" paintings beautifully combine scenes of children jumping rope with women dancing and flying over famous urban bridges around the nation.

The cut-and-sewn quilt-like border around many of the paintings becomes a tedious convention after repeated use, however, because Ringgold fails to unite its patterns in any way to the images they surround. Ringgold's mother made quilts and is honored in the beautiful "Mother's Quilt" but her daughter's invocation of the slave quilt tradition makes one appreciate the originals all the more.

Emotions see-saw on a happy/sad axis. One moment black and white people are spattered in blood ("Die") or inspecting a corpse ("The Wake and the Resurrection"). Next, they are skipping rope and running in marathons. a full-length sewn sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr. is more measured in tone. Scenes of family life in the "Baby Faith and Willi" series of 1982 at least leave something to the imagination with their abstracted figures.

Upstairs, light years away from Ringgold's anger and joy, the geometric paintings and drawings of Mary Henry form a small survey of their own. At 79, the Whidbey Island resident is still going strong, painting 12-foot-long canvases, and was recently included in major exhibitions in Wichita and Jerusalem. Earlier this year, she was named to the prestigious American Abstract Artists group in New York, the nation's oldest such institution.

Along with Ringgold, Mary Henry demonstrates how important a part of American art women are, regardless of race or choice of styles.