Seven Passages to a Flight, an Artists Book with a Story Quilt by Faith Ringgold, the Publisher's Own Copy. RINGGOLD, FAITH. 1930-2024. Seven Passages to a Flight. San Diego, CA: Brighton Press, 1995. Square folio (233 x 191 mm). 9 hand-painted etchings with multicolored pochoir borders and text, printed on linen. Original cloth binding by David Brock; original painted clamshell box with fabric inlays. Provenance: Bill Kelly, co-founder and director of Brighton Press.Provenance: Bill Kelly, co-founder and director of Brighton Press. ONE OF 15 COPIES WITH A HAND-SEWN QUILT PAINTED AND STENCILED BY HAND, THE PUBLISHER'S OWN COPY. Limited edition, number 3 of 30 copies SIGNED BY FAITH RINGGOLD. THE QUILT SIGNED AND DATED BY FAITH RINGGOLD: 'Faith Ringgold 9/15/98,' (overall 1260 x 1065 mm). The 9 hand-painted and -stenciled etchings in the artists book, reproduced on the quilt, were created by Faith Ringgold, Michele Burgess, Bill Kelly, and Nelle Martin. The imagery on the quilt is flanked at top and bottom with Ringgold's text, all of which is quilted in a diamond pattern that mimics the geometric border. This is all surrounded by a patchwork border with two layers of piping. From the printed limitation statement on the quilt: 'This autobiographical quilt is comprised of the nine etchings and text from Seven Passages to a Flight, an artist's book by Faith Ringgold. The etchings were printed on linen and stenciled by hand. The text was set in Perpetua and printed letterpress. Both the book and the quilt were published and produced by Brighton Press, San Diego, California in 1995-1996. There is a limited edition of thirty quilts, ten numbered in Roman numerals and twenty lettered A-T.' According to the Brighton Press records, however, although thirty quilts were planned, only 15 were produced. Other examples of the quilt are held by Museum of Modern Art, The San Diego Museum of Art, and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell. The text and illustrations in Seven Passages to a Flight are printed on linen, a nod to Ringgold's celebrated narrative quilts. Ringgold's use of fabrics with painting was an intentional move away traditional European modes of storytelling. Indeed, her first experience of 14th- and 15th-century Tibetan thangkas, during a visit to the Rijksmuseum in 1972, inspired her to include fabric borders around her own work. She learned how to quilt in the Black tradition from her mother, clothing designer Willie Posey Jones, and her grandmother, who had in turn learned it from her mother, Susie Shannon, an enslaved person. Seven Passages to a Flight is an autobiographical work that weaves the themes of race, gender, family, and the right to dream among the broader African American experience. Ringgold recalls her recurrent bouts of asthma as a child: 'While I was recuperating in bed, my mother would give me crayons and paints to make pictures, and pieces of cloth to make sewn things. I loved to copy the beautiful engravings of presidents from my brother and sister's history books.' As her artistic practice develops, she writes, 'probably the first time I rewrote history in my art was when I painted a mural of some black and white boys sitting together eating watermelon with George Washington's soldiers at Valley Forge.' According to critic and curator Darla Migan, 'Through her imaginative investigations into narratives of heritage, stretching back and forth across the Atlantic in different media, Faith Ringgold's artwork -- paintings, drawings, masks, books, and her latest inventions... -- questions America's historical formations, commemorates the tragic loss of life in the fight for equality, and celebrates the ongoing struggle for civil rights wherever that struggle is happening today. ...Rather than waiting for American history to canonize their significance or waiting for her own biography to surface, Ringgold moves against and within the legacy of the gallery exhibition to represent her personal journey as an artist ' (D. Migan, 'Looking but not seeing?,' Texte Zur Kunst, September 2018, p.170, 173). WITH A SMALL PRINTER'S ARCHIVE, assembled by co-founder and director of Brighton Press, Bill Kelly, himself a painter, printmaker, and sculptor. The archive includes six proofs of the hand-colored etchings printed on five sheets of linen (one double-sided): two black-and-white proofs in an early state, two colored proofs printed without a border (one with pencil border outlines for the border), and two double-page spreads of text and etching printed within multicolored pochoir borders. Also included is the printer's mock-up of the binding boards, and a single sheet with a quote in Ringgold's hand inscribed five times ('My father said we tore up the pattern for that one F.R.'). For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com For further information about this lot please visit the lot listing