Sonié Ruffin
Sonié Ruffin lives in stories. Her art and texts tell stories — from the beautiful and redeeming to the oppressive and tragic — which coalesce to preserve oral tradition. Ruffin learned fiber arts by watching her family’s quilting, crochet, cutwork and other fabric projects that surrounded and informed her youth. The artist’s first designs were in a runway show when she was 14 years old. An exuberant storyteller, Ruffin relayed to me a memory from the 1950s. When she was very young, one of her relatives gave her some fabric brought back from Africa. Elated and then rebuked, Ruffin was prevented from cutting into the imported cloth by her mother who quipped, “These fabrics have a power you must understand before you can use them.” Her family took care to preserve and continue some of the traditional African fiber practices and symbolic iconography. Ruffin, a quick and clever study, was soon sitting at the table with her “Queens” (female relatives working around the table), and even now, Ruffin‘s quilts incorporate some of these traditional African cloths and motifs. They include Kente, a cloth commissioned by Ashanti kings and other royals made by men for men (Ruffin uses this to trim pieces including the diptych Mammogram, 2010), and Mud Cloth, made by the whole community, originating in Mali (Mud Cloth inspired Ruffin’s original fabric called “Drums of Afrika” which she uses in Home Run, 2009).
Ruffin’s most elaborate work to date, Wynton Marsalis’ Conversation with Jazz, is inspired by a chance encounter she had with the musician at the Gem Theater in 2005. On this evening, Ruffin was taking in the view, snapping and swaying to the music, when she had a flashback to the night she first heard jazz music as an eight-year-old girl. Her father had taken her on an errand and instructed her to wait in the car at Mickey Mantle’s Holiday Inn in Joplin, MO. While waiting in the car, Ruffin realized there was a jazz show in the hotel that night. The scene held Ruffin in a trance: the women with their sequin dresses, crinoline petticoats and up ‘do’s and the music pouring out of the venue were like nothing she’d ever seen or heard before. Not wanting to miss out, the young Ruffin let herself in and squirmed through the crowd to see the whole stage. Ruffin’s father soon found her in the crowd and the club manager, a family friend, promptly brought the young jazz enthusiast a Shirley Temple. Flashing forward to the Gem concert in 2005, Ruffin watched Wynton Marsalis play his horn and was enlivened by the memory of her first jazz set. So came the inspiration for her dynamic Marsalis triptych. In the first panel the mood is anticipatory, and a locus of colored circles made of hand-dyed fabric form the recess of an abstract horn. Circles/notes and threads of sound stream forth referencing a musical staff. The second and largest panel is called “Syncopation & Strings.” Here the composition appears to be cracking open in a sound burst represented by the circular notes exploding across the panel. “Copasetic,” the last panel, refers to the cool part of a jazz sequence where the lead musician patiently listens, waiting for his turn for solo improvisation.
Across the country, quilting bees and guilds gather for community and fellowship. In Ruffin’s workshops, she encourages fellow quilters and textile artists to open up new modes of working which are less rigidly symmetrical or made from a generic pattern. Her collage-style process is fluid, and most often begins with sketches for composition and pattern. Ruffin encourages workshop participants to experiment with patterns and fabrics beginning with whatever materials they have on hand. Her goal in the workshops is to allow personal experiences and stories to take shape organically. Ruffin draws inspiration from artists such as Romare Bearden, Faith Ringgold, Phoebe Beasley and John T. Scott. Quilt making as artistic self-expression is crucial to Ruffin and the content of her work is shared. As she relayed to me during a studio visit, it is important “to get the stories right so that [people] can touch, feel and hold the stories and patterns and recreate them for themselves.”
From Essay by Lacey Wozny, Assistant Director, Grand Arts, July 2010.
