[Dr Arnd Stein Collection 1997 2009
Virginie Fayad
In December 2003, the Governor of Illinois named Kevin Stein Illinois Poet Laureate, filling the position previously held by Howard Austin, Carl Sandburg, and Gwendolyn Brooks. In that capacity Stein co-sponsors Illinois poetry competitions for Emerging Writers as well as grade, middle, and high school students. He also created the Poetry Now! project that has donated funds to nearly 50 Illinois libraries for the purchase of poetry by Illinois writers, designed and now maintains two laureate websites promoting the state's poetry, and has offered over 170 in-state readings and presentations.
As poet, critic, and editor, Stein has published eight poetry collections and chapbooks, three scholarly books, two poetry anthologies, and numerous poems and essays published in journals as well as anthologies. This work has received acclaim from reviewers, including notice by Julia Keller in the Chicago Tribune and Mark Eleveld in the Chicago Sun-Times.
Stein's newest collection, Wrestling Li Po for the Remote, is forthcoming in spring 2013 from Chicago's Fifth Star Press. Yusef Komunyakaa calls that volume "a tour de force . . . of mercurial wit and quickness, politics and aesthetics "in which "nothing seems to escape this poet's flawless ear and keen eye." Other recent collections include Sufficiency of the Actual (University of Illinois Press, 2009), which Bob Hicok notes as a "compelling and large-minded book," and American Ghost Roses (University of Illinois, 2005), the latter earning praise from David Wojahn for its "impeccable craft" and by Edward Hirsch for its "particularly American . . . way of fooling around to get at something deep and necessary." In addition, American Ghost Roses garnered the Society of Midland Authors 2006 Poetry Award.
Two other collections, Chance Ransom (2000) and Bruised Paradise (1996), also appeared in the University of Illinois Press Poetry Series. Earlier, his first poetry volume, A Circus of Want (University of Missouri Press, 1992), earned the Devins Award for Poetry. Elsewhere, his poetry has been honored with the Frederick Bock Prize awarded by Poetry, the 1998 Indiana Review Poetry Prize, and four Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards including the 2007 award for his poem "Middle-aged Adam's and Eve's Bedside Tables." In addition, Stein has been the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship and three such fellowships granted by the Illinois Arts Council, as well as grant support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2004 he was awarded the Vernon Louis Parrington Medal for Distinguished Writing. His poems and essays have appeared widely in journals such as American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Colorado Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Southern Review, and TriQuarterly.
In addition to poetry, Stein has published scholarly works, including the essays of Poetry's Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age (University of Michigan Press, 2010). This book rejects the currently trendy notion that poetry is dead and instead argues for its lively hereafter in our increasingly digital age. Private Poets, Worldly Acts (Ohio University Press, 1996; rpt. 1999) examines the intersection of public and private history in the work of nine American poets, including Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, Frank O'Hara, Philip Levine, and Rita Dove. This volume was named a 1997 Recommended Book by Amazon.com, the citation applauding how the book's "insightful visions" lift readers "beyond just reading a poem - to reading between its lines." Also, Stein's James Wright: The Poetry of a Grown Man (Ohio University Press, 1989) remains the benchmark study of this important American poet.
Stein extended his scholarly interests by editing two anthologies of Illinois poetry. In 2007 Stein edited Bread & Steel, the first-ever audio CD poetry anthology of 24 Illinois poets reading from their works. With the late poet G. E. Murray, Stein also edited Illinois Voices: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Poetry (University of Illinois Press, 2001). This volume offers the first comprehensive anthology of Illinois poetry's twentieth-century heritage. Following the publication of Illinois Voices, Murray and Stein traveled throughout the state to lead discussions and readings from the anthology at libraries in locales such as Chicago, Charleston, Peoria, Springfield, and Urbana.
The French Collection is a series of twelve quilt paintings by American artist Faith Ringgold completed between 1991 and 1997. Divided into two parts composed of eight and four quilts each, the series utilizes Ringgold's distinct style of story quilts to tell the fictional story of a young African American woman in the 1920s, Willia Marie Simone, who leaves Harlem for Paris to live as an artist and model. The stories, illustrated in acrylic paint and written in ink surrounding the paintings, narrate Willia Marie's journey as she befriends famous artists, performers, writers, and activists (many of whom would not have lived during the era or in the region), runs a caf and works as a painter, and develops a distinct Black feminist intellectual worldview based on her experiences and identity. Willia Marie's interactions with notable modernist artists and their oeuvres are an archetypical example of Ringgold's responses to the predominantly white male artistic canon, wherein she often directly invoked, embraced, and challenged the central figures of modernist art.
Exhibited as a full set for the first time in 1998, five of the quilts are now located in public museums and galleries across the United States while the remaining seven are in private collections. The French Collection quilts are among Ringgold's most well-known works and have been extensively reproduced as prints, posters, and in popular media. Ringgold continued the narrative begun in this series with The American Collection (1997).
Ringgold began working on The French Collection in 1990 and finished the bulk of the series in 1991.[1] #10: Jo Baker's Birthday; #11: Le Caf des Artistes; and #12: Moroccan Holiday were completed later, in 1993, 1994, and 1997, respectively. Ringgold traveled extensively in the early 1990s throughout France for visual inspiration using funding from her employer, the University of California, San Diego, as well as from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her travels included a three-month residency at La Napoule Art Foundation in Mandelieu-la-Napoule, where she first began her paintings. Artist Denise Mumm assisted with the quilting process and Lisa Yi, then Ringgold's assistant in New York, copied the written stories onto the works.[1]
The twelve quilts were exhibited together for the first time at Ringgold's show Dancing at the Louvre (1998-1999), originating at the New Museum in New York.[1] The collection has only been exhibited together one time since the original showing, at Ringgold's retrospective Faith Ringgold: American People (2022), also originating at the New Museum.[2]
Ringgold continued the narrative begun in The French Collection in a second series of quilts, The American Collection (1997), which are meant to be understood as paintings by Willia Marie's daughter Marlena and do not include full stories in text.[3]
Each quilt is made with acrylic paint on canvas, patterned fabric, and text written in ink on canvas. The quilts tell the narrative of Willia Marie Simone, a 16-year-old African American girl who is moving from Harlem, New York, to Paris, in 1920 to paint and model. Willia Marie's Aunt Melissa gives her $500 for the journey and eventually agrees to care for her children, and they exchange letters over the course of her time in Europe.[1] Ringgold's daughter has described the quilts and stories in The French Collection:
How Willia Marie's life subsequently unfolds, rendering her ultimately a successful expatriate Black woman artist living in France, is explained in an elliptical series of stories, most but not all of which are presented in the form of letters home to Aunt Melissa. These narratives, which are handwritten on the quilts, are paired with a series of images designed to provide a visual presentation of Willia Marie's progress.
While five of the quilts are located in public collections and a number of the quilts are owned by noted public figures, some are owned by unknown private collections and may be in the collection of the artist's estate or gallery.[4]
Dancing at the Louvre depicts Willia Marie and a stylish Black woman whose three daughters in colorful dresses are dancing happily in an art gallery at the Louvre. Several paintings are rendered on the wall behind the figures, including the Mona Lisa. In the written text, Willia Marie writes to her Aunt Melissa about a friend named Marcia (the pictured woman), who scolded Willia Marie for not bringing her children with her to Europe.[1] Ringgold modeled Marcia and her children on the artist's own children in real life, whom she did not bring to Europe with her on her trips for inspiration for the series.[5]
Wedding on the Seine depicts Willia Marie in a wedding dress, running across the Pont Neuf bridge over the Seine in Paris. The le de la Cit and architecture of the city are visible behind her and tower over Willia Marie as she throws a bouquet into the river. The text provides background information about Willia Marie's marriage: she fears that marriage and children will harm her artistic career, but her wealthy French husband passed away after they were married for three years.[5]
Picnic at Giverny depicts Willia Marie painting a portrait of a group of brightly-dressed women standing and sitting at a picnic in front of a pond at Giverny, in addition to the artist Pablo Picasso who is posing nude on the ground wearing a hat, looking over his shoulder at the viewer. The women are various real-life patrons and artistic supporters of Ringgold's, including the artist Emma Amos. In the text, Willia Marie writes to her Aunt Melissa that she was invited to Giverny - Claude Monet's home at the time - to paint a portrait, and based the portrait on douard Manet's painting Le Djeuner sur l'herbe (1893). Willia Marie tells her Aunt that the inclusion of the elderly, naked Picasso was a reversal of the Manet work, in which the men are clothed and the women are naked. She also tells her Aunt that instead of painting strictly about the social ills of her time, she wants to paint things that will inspire and liberate her audience.[7]
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