One of Ringgold’s many “story quilts,” this painting tells the tale of Abraham Lincoln Jones (AJ), a fictional black man, in words and pictures painted on quilted canvas.

In three parts (The Accident, The Fire, and The Homecoming), you can follow Abraham’s chaotic life, through the death of his mother and siblings in a car accident, the death of his father in a fire, a fraught adolescence full of run-ins with the cops and the Mafia, his return from Vietnam, and a final rise to Hollywood stardom by the encouragement of his grandmother.

Story quilts are an important part of Ringgold’s body of work. Inspired by the skilled craft her great-great grandmother practiced as a slave, Ringgold produced many quilted paintings that pissed off curators and critics by blurring the lines between craft and fine art. Ringgold’s mother, a fashion designer and seamstress, pieced together the first of the quilts before she died. Ringgold’s quilts allude to her family’s generations of skilled, creative women, and carry on an age-old tradition of African American storytelling in a contemporary context. So, to appreciate her work is to acknowledge the contributions of the black female makers and storytellers that came before her. Righteous. 

The quilts have inspired many of Ringgold’s 16 children’s books...but probably not this one, since the content is rather mature. Read the whole thing through and you’ll find the part about school-aged AJ getting drunk with his dad. That (and all the gruesome, fiery death) doesn’t make for a great bedtime story.

Thankfully, the story isn’t a true--at least not in the sense that some of Ringgold’s autobiographical quilts are. That said, through the telling of what she calls modern “dilemma tales,” Ringgold aims to challenge cultural conceptions about black people through stories that hint at realities unfamiliar to many viewers.

In the 25+ years that The Met has owned the work, it has only be displayed in two exhibitions. Time to air that baby out!