Journey of the Highwaymen Book

I picked this up by chance, never having heard of Faith Ringgold, and I'm so glad I did. I found it both a lovely introduction to her incredibly varied art - everything from painting to dolls to performance art to "story-quilts" - and a compelling record of her life as a black woman and an artist whose life bridges the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement and beyond. Clear accounts of her extraordinary mother, her difficult relationship with her daughters, and her attempts to create a life that made room for art mix with an exploration of her ever-widening circles of activism and advocacy for artists of color.

I did sometimes wish the book was structured in a more integrated way - having a chapter about her teaching, a chapter about her feminist work, etc. meant getting pulled around in time a lot. But this was really a minor quibble, and it reflects the complexity of her life well, as do the texts of her story quilts which she includes. She's spent her life telling stories and listening to them told, and it shows.