Picasso's Studio Analysis

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Picasso’s Studio, created by Faith Ringgold, is an acrylic on canvas with a pieced fabric border. Faith Ringgold is known as an author, painter, women’s rights activist, civil rights activist and an educator. She is mostly known for her innovative, quilted narrations like Tar Beach. In these “story quilts,” she expands upon the tradition of quilting by adding painted scenes to the central panel of her quilts and then surrounds these with narrative text panels. Picasso’s Studio created in 1991 is part of the French Collection Part I. The French Collection is a series of twelve story quilts that tell the story of an African American artist, who’s also the imaginary alter-ego that Ringgold invented. Today, Picasso’s Studio can be found at the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts.
In the wonderfully jumbled Picasso’s Studio, the artist has relegated Picasso nearly to the margin, crowded between the fabric border and his model. Picasso, one of …show more content…

Ringgold draws the preparations for Picasso’s painting to the upper right side of the piece, but most importantly, she draws the posing figure of Willia Marie Simone towards the center. Both of these aspects of the work push Picasso’s masterpiece to the background, and deny Picasso’s masterpiece its spontaneity. Another thing she does by making herself the center of the piece is that she asserts herself and her creativity. Ringgold’s alter-ego, Willia Marie Simone, is also used to represent what members of the avant-garde were not: females of non-European descent who were most often the subject-matter instead of its maker. Even more, she alludes to the situation of women artist in the 19th and 20th century, who were denied formal training open to men. In this story quilt Faith Ringgold bombards the audience with questions about the root of primitivism in Western art, feminist reclamation, as well as ownership of the female

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