FAITH RINGGOLD (1930 - ) Night: Window of the Wedding 8.
Acrylic on canvas tanka, with printed and woven fabrics, 1974. 1575x737 mm; 62x29 inches. Signed, titled, dated, numbered F8 and inscribed Window of the Wedding Tanka in ink on a sewn cloth patch, lower right verso. From the Window of the Wedding series.
Provenance: gift of the artist to Bill Thompson, her agent, in the 1970s; private collection.
This extraordinary, early tanka is the first of the artist's celebrated fabric paintings to come to auction. The Window of the Wedding series is also one of the earliest of her unstretched fabric paintings. Faith Rinngold was inspired by Tibetan Buddhist thangkas, paintings on silk and hung from wood dowels, that she encountered on a visit to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in the summer of 1972. There are 20 works in the Window of the Wedding that she made in 1974 to represent the imaginary future weddings of her daughters, and were hung together as an installation. Many of these remain in her personal collection today. Farrington pp. 41 and 63.
