Black in black: Time, memory, and the African-American identity

African Americans have two distinctly different past heritages: their African heritage and their American slave heritage. They must recall and accept both in order to portray an open, truthful African-American experience and an accurate cultural identity that they can honor. Painter John Biggers and story-quilter Faith Ringgold, both African-American artists, weave together contemporary moments of their respective eras with glorious and traumatic cultural memories of the past to celebrate and pay tribute to the African-American experience and cultural identity and to allow African Americans to embrace fully and with pride who they really are. Each artist fashions a unique structure that assembles pieces of the here and there and the now and then, that restores the flow of linear time from past to present to future, and that generates a trustworthy and notable portrait of the African-American experience and African-American cultural identity.