| The French Collection | |
|---|---|
 Part I, #4: Sunflowers Quilting Bee at Arles at the New Museum in New York in 2022 | |
| Artist | Faith Ringgold |
| Year | 1991 |
| Medium | Acrylic on canvas, quilt art |
| Followed by | The American Collection (1997) |
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 café 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).