射射屋

Summary of Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold took the traditional craft of quilt making (which has its roots in the slave culture of the south - pre-civil war era) and re-interpreted its function to tell stories of her life and those of others in the black community. One of her most famous story quilts is Tar Beach, which depicts a family gathered on their rooftop on a hot summer night.

As a social activist, she used art to start and grow such organizations as Where We At that support African American women artists. Her foundation Anyone Can Fly, continues to be devoted to expanding the art canon to include artists of the African diaspora and to introduce the African American masters to children and adult audiences.

Accomplishments

• Ringgold's early art and activism were inextricably intertwined. Her art confronted prejudice directly and made political statements, often using the shock value of racial slurs within her works to highlight the ethnic tension, political unrest, and the race riots of the 1960s. Her works provide crucial insight into perceptions of white culture by African Americans and vice versa.
• She combined her African heritage and artistic traditions with her artistic training to create paintings, multi-media soft sculptures, and "story quilts" that elevate the sewn arts to the status of fine art.
• In her story quilt Tar Beach the term 'Tar Beach' refers to the urban rooftop itself, commonly used as a place on which to escape the oppressive heat of an inner city without air conditioning. The adults visit with each other while the children play and sleep on their blankets. The daughter dreams of flying freely over all barriers, which is represented by the George Washington bridge in the background. Ringgold consciously chose to lend a Folk Art quality to techniques in her story quilts as a means of emphasizing their narrative importance over compositional style.
• Her later works dealt with prejudice in a different way. No longer using confrontational imagery to attack prejudice, she subverted it, instead by providing young African Americans with positive role models, re-imaging hurtful racial stereotypes as strong, successful, and heroic women.

Important Art by Faith Ringgold

Artwork Images

1964

Mr. Charlie

A mature, white American businessman is depicted in bold colors, hard edges, and flat, simplified shapes. He holds his hand over his heart and stares ahead with a blank, but condescending expression. The man's vacant expression suggests someone so fixated on his own point of view that he cannot truly see or hear anyone else's experience. The gesture of his hand pressed to his chest appears to protect and excuse him from any kind of response or responsibility. The figure, too large to be contained within the bounds of the canvas, possesses a sort of looming presence made all the more intimidating by Ringgold's placement of him in the extreme forefront of the picture plane. The two dimensionality of the image suggests that he represents a type of person, rather than a specific man, without human depth or feeling.

The title of the piece refers to the African-American expression "Mr. Charlie," which was used to describe a racist white man. By using primary colors for both his suit and the background, Ringgold suggested the man has a kind of assumed privilege; he and the world reflect one another.

Oil on canvas - Collection of the artist

Artwork Images

1966

Woman Looking in a Mirror

The American People, series which Ringgold described as "about the condition of black and white America and the paradoxes of integration felt by many black Americans," includes twenty works. Some of the images confront racism and racial violence while others draw upon the "black power" or "black is beautiful" message that came out of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

Here, Ringgold depicted an African American woman seated before a window, perhaps at the moment before getting dressed, as she appears to be wearing undergarments. The woman looks into a handheld mirror, while in the background, the window overflows with blue and green geometric trees and bushes. The black branches and trunks of the plants frame the woman and echo the curves and angles of her form. The stylized rendering evokes the work of Henri Rousseau and Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror, with their broad expanses of color heavily outlined in black.

The window behind the woman shows a verdant, light-filled jungle, suggesting an African landscape, and creating the sense that the woman is at home in this setting. Its lushness complements and highlights the beauty of her image. Gazing at herself in her hand mirror demonstrates to the viewer the importance of her own self-regard over those of the male gaze or of white society. The feminist viewpoint combined with one of black power conveys the message that an African-American woman is beautiful when regarded by herself.

Oil on canvas - ACA Galleries

Artwork Images

1967

Die

Ringgold had hoped to participate in the first World Festival of Black Arts in 1966 but was rebuffed by Hale Woodruff, who curated the artwork for the festival. Of Woodruff's criticism, Ringgold wrote: "I thought it was insulting that he thought I didn't know anything about rhythm or movement... I decided I'm going to show him I know rhythm and movement because my teachers did teach me those aspects of paintings. They didn't teach me anything about being a black artist; no I learned that by myself. But they did teach me about movement and that sort of thing. And that's when I did DIE - the biggest painting I had done up until then. ...A tribute to these guys who want to try to tell me I don't know what I am doing."

In a style that Ringgold called "super realism," this work depicts the race riots of the 1960s in America as a melee of random violence. The repeating adult figures, African Americans and whites, are injured, and fighting or fleeing, while a white boy and an African-American girl huddle together in the center of the canvas, framed by the falling limbs of an African-American man and a white woman being shot. The violence contrasts with well-dressed appearances of the figures; the men in black pants and white shirts, the women in fashionable dresses and heels.

The black and white color of the men's clothing visually emphasizes that racism is the origin of the violence, and the well-dressed appearance conveys that no class of society is exempt. The painting showcased Ringgold's knowledge of artistic style combined with her experience of the violence generated by racism and her fear that racial violence would become endemic.

Influenced by both Picasso's Guernica and the depiction of race riots in Jacob Lawrence's The Migration Series, Ringgold intended to depict the racial turmoil following the Civil Rights movement. As an African American woman, she also wanted to respond to the societal expectations of the art world which, as she said, viewed art as "a conceptual or material process, a commodity, and not a political platform...To be emotionally involved in art was considered to be primitive."

Art critic Michele Wallace has said of DIE, "the painting illustrates Ringgold's mastery of the Western canonical strategy of expressing narrative and figurative movement by placing the same group of figures across the picture plane in various stages of the scene. In contrast to act of reading left to right, the artist situates the stampede-like wrestling of forms in the right side of the canvas, almost spilling over to the left portion of the composition. "

Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Artwork Images

1969

Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger

The painting's title acknowledges the first moon landing in 1969. Instead of the traditional flag that the American astronauts planted on the surface of the moon, Ringgold inscribed, "die" in black lettering within the stars and has broken and changed the stripes, so that the white stripes read "nigger."

The work is part of her Black Light series where Ringgold said that she intended to create a "more affirmative black aesthetic." She also noted how "white western art was focused around the color white and light/contrast/chiaroscuro, while African cultures in general used darker colors and emphasized color rather than tonality to create contrast." Here, she muted the contrast of the traditional flag image, as if overshadowed by racism.

Influenced by Jasper Johns' Flag, Ringgold changed his ambiguous image into an explicit critique of American racism from the viewpoint of the African-American community at the end of the Civil Rights era. Explaining why she incorporated the words within the stars and stripes, Ringgold said, "It would be impossible for me to picture the American flag just as a flag, as if that is the whole story. I need to communicate my relationship with this flag based on my experience as a black woman in America."

Oil on canvas - ACA Galleries, New York City

Artwork Images

1974

Aunt Bessie and Aunt Edith

In her Family of Women mask series Ringgold portrayed thirty-one women and children from her childhood. Here, Aunt Bessie and Aunt Edith are depicted wearing masks, influenced by Ringgold's interest in African art. Willi Posey, Ringgold's mother, made garments for ten of the figures in the series. Although the figures are posed without bodies beneath their garments, they both possess large, matronly bosoms. Both figures depicted here wear colorful, beaded collars, and one wears a whistle around her neck, reminiscent, perhaps of the whistles she used in protest of the Whitney Museum's lack on inclusion of women artists or artists of color. The expressions of the masks are wide-eyed and open-mouthed, highlighted by white lines to emphasize their features, and are surmounted by a braided wig.

As Ringgold said, "Because the mask is your face, the face is a mask, so I'm thinking of the face as a mask because of the way I see faces is coming from an African vision of the mask which is the thing that we carry around with us, it is our presentation, it's our front, it's our face." Even though the women wear African-influenced textiles as dresses and masks, they could also represent two women on a neighborhood stoop, exchanging neighborhood gossip, and turning faces of watchfulness and commonality toward the viewer. As a result, the figures seem familiar, despite their exotic ornamentation.

Cloth sculpture - Collection of artist

Artwork Images

1980

Echoes of Harlem

Made with her mother, Willi Posey, this first quilt by Ringgold features depictions of thirty residents of Harlem. Painted in a grid system, the faces appear gazing from various angles set off from each other by rectangular-shaped quilt work in the border. The portraits are arranged in a pattern with twelve blue-background images in the center and a blue-background portrait in each corner. Fourteen depictions with a golden brown background are centered within all four sides of the work.

The twentieth century trend of using grid patterns to organize a composition is combined with the traditional piece work of quilt making; the overall effect is reminiscent of screen printing, the replication of images as used by Warhol in his pop art.

With the use of the predominantly blue background, Ringgold creates a sense of a harmonious and diversified community. Racial differences are suggested by the contrasting colors of the portrait squares. The overall effect is to acknowledge the diversity that makes up Harlem but presented as if a harmonious whole in a quilt that provides warmth and a continuation of story and heritage as it would if it were passed down through a family.

Paint on cotton - The Studio Museum in Harlem

Artwork Images

1983

Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima?

This was Ringgold's first story quilt and the first quilt project she made by herself, without the help of her mother, who died the previous year. Squares along the borders depict African-American women of varying ages from all walks of life, and the squares in the center depict a variety of different people, each connected to a block of text that tell some part of Aunt Jemima's story. The center square resembles a book title page and declares the piece a "quilt book."

As Michele Wallace, the artist's daughter and art critic, has noted, the work answers the question "what are we (as black women) supposed to do with our lives and how are we supposed to do it?" Ringgold contradicts a common stereotype of an African-American woman by here recasting Aunt Jemima as a successful businesswoman and notes that the work is also "a feminist statement about the stereotype of black women as fat. Aunt Jemima conveys the same negative connotation as Uncle Tom, simply because of her looks.'' By focusing on a heroic matriarch, Ringgold also connects to Aunt Jemima's story her own success in overcoming the stereotypes she faced as an African-American woman and artist.

Acrylic on canvas, dyed, painted and pieced fabric - Private Collection

Artwork Images

1988

Tar Beach

Tar Beach, Ringgold's best known work, is the first quilt in her Woman on a Bridge series about a young African-American girl, Cassie Louise Lightfoot, growing up in Harlem. In 1991 Ringgold published Tar Beach as a children's book for ages four to eight, and the book was named a Caldecott Honor Book, A New York Times Best Illustrated Book, and won the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration and the Parents' Choice Gold Award. Featured on the children鈥檚 TV show Reading Rainbow, widely recommended by librarians and read by countless school children, Ringgold became a household name.

The story quilt depicts a family spending time outdoors on the rooftop or 鈥渢ar beach鈥� of their apartment building. In the center image; clothes are drying on a clothesline; four people are gathered around a table playing cards, another table has food, and Cassie and her younger brother are resting on a blanket. The background depicts the New York City skyline, where Cassie is also is shown flying over the George Washington Bridge.

The scene is bordered by fabric squares, many of them with floral patterns, and at the top and bottom of the quilt another border of rectangles contains text, telling the girl's story. At top left the story begins, "I will always remember when the stars fell around me and lifted me above the George Washington Bridge." Another section reads, "Sleeping on Tar Beach was magical ...only eight years old and in the third grade and I can fly. That means I am free to go wherever I want to for the rest of my life."

Ringgold's use of color and the repeating floral motif creates a garden-like border and a sense of familial warmth. By painting decorative embellishments onto her piecework with the same color she has subtly unified the many and varied color blocks used to create the border. By adopting a 鈥渘aive鈥� or 鈥渇olk鈥� technique that avoids perspective and shading, Ringgold suggests that the experience depicted in the work is being expressed directly and freely, from within the internal life of her character. Ringgold drew upon her own experience growing up to create the character, but also wanted to convey an empowering feminist message. As she said of the series, "My women are actually flying; they are just free, totally. They take their liberation by confronting this huge masculine icon - the bridge."

Acrylic on canvas, bordered with printed, painted, quilted, and pieced cloth - The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Artwork Images

1986

Change: Faith Ringgold's Over 100 Pounds Weight Loss Performance Story Quilt

Rectangular blocks of text describe Ringgold's personal and political relationship to food, the social expectations of weight and body image in women, and her undertaking an almost yearlong weight loss program. In alternating rectangles, a collage of black and white images include photos of Ringgold at different ages, family photos, and images of women in terms of body image and weight. Overlaying the quilt rectangles is a quilt square pattern, which creates an x shape across each block of text or image.

Ringgold said "The reason why I began making quilts is because I wrote my autobiography in 1980 and couldn't get it published, because I wanted to tell my story and my story didn't appear to be appropriate for African-American women, that's what I think, and that really made me so angry." She continued telling that story in Change 2 (1988) and Change 3 (1989).

The profusion of images and texts, personal and political, individual and cultural, are meant to make the viewer aware of the societal messages that are brought to bear upon the individual woman who is influenced by them and tries to live up to them. Yet the x shape drawn across each block of text or image seems to cross out the message each block contains, as if suggesting that trying to follow each message has resulted in failure, just as a dieter may try diet after diet without success. Ringgold connected her own struggle with weight loss with the feminist issue of self-image and societal expectations.

Photo etching on silk - Private Collection

Artwork Images

1991

The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles

In 1959 after earning her Master's degree in Fine Art, Ringgold went to Europe to study the work of the masters, particularly the work of the Impressionists and Cubists. She was struck by the absence of people of color except as models or subjects, and years later in The French Collection began looking at the tradition of European art from the viewpoint of an African-American artist.

A group of noted African-American women from history, seated in a field of sunflowers, is depicted creating a quilt of sunflowers. The setting in the background is Arles, best known for the time that Vincent Van Gogh spent there and the paintings he produced. The women depicted are Madam Walker, Sojourner Truth, Ida Wells, Fannie Lou Hammer, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Ella Baker. To the right of the women stands Vincent van Gogh, holding a vase of sunflowers, reminiscent of the seven still lifes with sunflowers he painted while at Arles. Here, he offers his sunflowers as a sign of respect and appreciation to these legendary women.

Ringgold represents the tradition of African-American quilt making as a collective effort, passed down through the generations of women in her family, and juxtaposes it with the tradition of the solitary male European painter, represented here by Van Gogh. The quilt they are making with its sunflowers is in harmony with the natural world that surrounds them.

Writing in the New York Times, critic Roberta Smith noted, "This tribute to female solidarity and individual struggle gets its real force from Ms. Ringgold's contrasting depictions of the quilted sunflowers and the painted sunflower field, which make their own political point in purely visual terms. In short, the artist juxtaposes the solitary, traditionally male activity of painting with the collective, traditionally female one of quilting, while fusing their different visual effects into a single work of art."

Acrylic on canvas, pieced fabric border - Private Collection

Artwork Images

2000

Under a Blood Red Sky

In 1999 Ringgold began working on the Coming to Jones Road series, which focused on the escape of slaves to the north via the Underground Railroad. Here she combined a contemporary artistic practice, screen-printing with a story quilt that in image and text conveys the story of the slaves' flight to freedom. The use of bright, vibrant colors and flat, simplified shapes are both reminiscent of the work of Henri Matisse. The border is tie-dyed piecework with an outer edge of zebra striped fabric.

In the central image a large number of African-American slaves, men, women, and children, some of them carrying burdens, are making their way from the red foreground into the forest of tall green trees with blue trunks and, ultimately to the house on Jones Road. Just right of the upper center of the image, the sun can be seen. The image is bordered with text conveying the story.

The black figures on the red ground and beneath a red sky suggest the difficult struggle for freedom in a world saturated with racial violence. The small yellow sun is the only bright spot in the image, its yellow highlighted by the yellow sunbursts of the border. Ringgold explained her artistic intention; "I have tried to couple the beauty of this place with the harsh realities of its racist history to create a freedom series that turns all of the ugliness of spirit, past and present into something livable."

Many of the works in this series include landscapes. In 1992, Ringgold moved with her husband, Burdette, from Harlem to Englewood, New Jersey, purchasing a home on Jones Road, saying "I came over here and landed on Jones Road - you know my maiden name is Jones, so I just felt that this was where I was supposed to be - and bought this house." Wanting to build a studio behind the new home, however, she met with a great deal of resistance from the predominantly white neighborhood, which fought the proposal, a reaction that Ringgold felt reflected racial prejudice. She responded to the experience by turning her artistic efforts toward capturing the area's natural beauty and built a garden. She said, "art is a healer and the sheer beauty of living in a garden amidst trees, plants, and flowers has inspired me to look away from my neighbors' unfolded animosity toward me and focus my attention on the stalwart traditions of black people who had come to New Jersey centuries before me." By making Jones Road their eventual destination as her own home, Ringgold was able to enfold herself within the story as well as the history.

Silkscreen on canvas with pieced border - Pasadena City College, Pasadena, CA

Biography of Faith Ringgold

Childhood

Faith Ringgold was born Faith Willi Jones and grew up in New York City. The artist said of her own upbringing, "I grew up in Harlem during the Great Depression. This did not mean I was poor and oppressed. We were protected from oppression and surrounded by a loving family.鈥�

She was the youngest child of Andrew Louis Jones, who was a minster (and thus a powerful storyteller) and a New York City sanitation truck driver, and Willie Posey Jones. Both of her parents came from families that had experienced the Great Migration, the relocation of millions of African Americans from the rural south to the urban north during the first half of the twentith century.

Andrew left the family when Faith was only two years old, but he stayed in close contact with his children. Her mother, a seamstress, attended the Fashion Institute of Technology, and went on to become a successful fashion designer, launching her own label, Mme. Willi Posey, with an atelier in Harlem, and managing to move the family to the exclusive Sugar Hill area of Harlem where neighbors included Harlem Renaissance greats like Duke Ellington, Dinah Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune, Aaron Douglas, and Thurgood Marshall. Ringgold thus grew up with a sense of vibrant creative possibilities, a strong sense of family and community, but also an awareness of segregation, racism, and economic inequities.

Often unable to attend school due to severe asthma, Ringgold was encouraged in her artistic pursuits by both her father, who gifted her her first easel (salvaged during his garbage pick-up rounds), and by her mother who taught her how to sew and use patterns. Ringgold helped with her mother's fashion shows, and said that, "She taught me how to stand up there and have a little joke and just feel comfortable with myself and to self-promote one's work." Her grandmother taught her quilting and the importance of the African-American tradition in telling stories, conveying messages, and creating community. Quilt making was a family tradition as Ringgold's grandmother had learned the art from her mother, Susie Shannon, a former slave.

Ringgold鈥檚 brother Andrew carried on the family gift for storytelling. Ringgold recalled how 鈥淲e went to the movies at a time when there were already great stories, but they didn鈥檛 have any Black people in them 鈥� or if they did, you didn鈥檛 like the way the characters were, so my brother would come home and he would rewrite everything.鈥� Tragically, as a teenager, Andrew Jr. was beaten by a group of young white men when running an errand for their mother in an affluent white neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, and was subsequently refused treatment at a nearby hospital. Though he survived, he was 鈥渘ever the same鈥�, fell into addiction, and passed away from an overdose in 1961.

Early Training

In 1950, intending to study art, Ringgold enrolled at New York's City College but, because art was then believed to be an exclusively male profession, she was required to enroll in art education in order to study art. Characteristically, she took this obstacle as a kind of challenge to be overcome, as she said, "I have always known that the way to get what you want is don't settle for less... I always knew I would be an artist." Ringgold married classical and jazz musician Robert Earl Wallace that same year, though the marriage ended in divorce after four years due to Wallace's drug addiction. The couple had two daughters, Michele Faith Wallace, and Barbara Faith Wallace. Ringgold graduated in 1955 with a bachelor's degree in Fine Art and Education.

At City College, Ringgold studied with the Japanese-American artist Yasuo Koniyoshi and American Social Realist painter Robert Gwathmey, and met African-American artist Robert Blackburn, with whom she later collaborated. After graduation, Ringgold began teaching art in the public school system in New York and began working toward a Master of Fine Arts degree at City College. Earning her degree in 1959, Ringgold said, "I got a fabulous education in art - wonderful teachers who taught me everything except anything about African art or African American art, but I traveled and took care of that part myself.鈥�

Exploring what it meant to be an African-American artist, Ringgold said, "I found my artistic identity and my personal vision in the 60s by looking at African masks; and my art form through the serial paintings (Migration of the Negro series) of Jacob Lawrence. The powerful geometry of African masks and sculpture that informed Modern art is what I like best about Picasso, Matisse and the other Modern European masters I was taught to copy. It is their exquisite compositions of shape, form, color and texture that make Picasso, Matisse and Jacob Lawrence's work so wonderful."

Mature Period

Finding it difficult as an African-American woman artist to find gallery representation for her work, Ringgold had a meeting with Ruth White who ran a gallery in New York in 1963 that proved life-changing. White, examining Ringgold's paintings of still lifes and landscapes, told her she could not show her works. Discussing the meeting afterwards with her second husband, Burdette 鈥淏irdie" Ringgold, whom she had married on May 19, 1962, Ringgold said, "You know something? I think what she's saying is - it's the 1960s, all hell is breaking loose all over, and you're painting flowers and leaves. You can't do that. Your job is to tell your story. Your story has to come out of your life, your environment, who you are, where you come from.鈥�

In the early 1960s, Ringgold began painting the American People series. In 1967, an invitation from Robert Newman for a solo show at his co-op gallery Spectrum gave new impetus to the work. Painting over the summer in the then-closed gallery that Newman allowed her to use as a studio, she had time and space free of familial obligations to create major works. She followed with the Black Light series. These two series, according to Neuberger Museum of Art's Tracy Fitzpatrick, "inform everything else she did, and you really cannot fundamentally understand the rest of her body of work without seeing it in the context of that first work.鈥�

Ringgold's work met with an indifferent response from the art world, as she described, "Some of it has been shown now and then. Like Die has been shown here and there but they were ignored primarily by the black and white art world. Amazingly ignored鈥� During the '60s, it was not appropriate to do political art. Everything was political in the sixties, except the visual arts." Again, Ringgold responded to an obstacle as a challenge, as she put it "they did me a favor by ignoring me...And I knew that. Why should I try to please an audience I don't have? But what I thought and what I did and have done and continue to do is please myself. I wanted to tell my story. Who am I and why? "

At the same time, Ringgold became an activist for feminist and anti-racism causes. She cofounded the Ad Hoc Women's Art Committee with art critic and historian Lucy Lippard and artist Poppy Johnson to protest an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1968. No women, and no-African American artists were included in the show. To protest, the group left eggs in the Whitney, and Ringgold came up with the idea of each member blowing a whistle to disrupt the show. Subsequently, Ringgold cofounded Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation, the National Black Feminist Organization, and the "Where We At" Black Women Artists collective. In the early 1970s, she painted a mural For the Women's House as a permanent installation at the Women's House of Detention on Riker's Island. As a result, Art Without Walls, an organization that brings art to prison populations, was founded.

In the early 1970s Ringgold's work moved away from traditional painting as she began using fabric and experimenting with soft sculpture. Influenced by the traditional Western African use of masks, she created costumes by painting linen canvas to which she added beads, raffia hair, and painted gourds for breasts. Each work represented a character, as she said that she wanted each mask to represent a "spiritual and sculptural identity." As she intended the pieces in her Witch mask series to be worn, not displayed merely as art objects, she developed her first Performance Art piece, The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro, a narrative that dealt with the effects of slavery and drug addiction in the African-American community. Ringgold's Family of Woman mask series continued her work in mask costumes, while also including her life-sized portrait soft sculpture of NBA basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain, who had made negative comments about African-American women.

In 1972 on a visit to Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, Ringgold saw an exhibit of thangkas, Buddhist paintings on cloth scrolls, and was inspired to add fabric borders to her paintings as in her Slave Rape Series of 1983, which focused on the slave trade viewed from the experience of an African woman taken into slavery. Ringgold also drew upon the African-American tradition of quilt making, and in 1980, working with her mother, created Echoes of Harlem, which depicted thirty local residents. Quilts allowed Ringgold to tell stories by combining images with handwritten texts. The narratives focused on a character, sometimes drawn from cultural history as in Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima? (1983) and sometimes autobiographical as in Tar Beach or Change: Faith Ringgold's Over 100 Pounds Weight Loss Performance Story Quilt, both from 1986.

The 1980s offered Ringgold wider opportunities. She began teaching art at the University of California, San Diego in 1987, a position she held until she retired as professor emeritus in 2002. A publisher, after seeing Tar Beach, her story quilt, expressed interest in Ringgold turning the work into a children's book, which was published in 1991 and launched Ringgold's career as an author of award-winning children's books, based upon the stories and images of her art projects.

All the while Ringgold continued to develop images that questioned European art and culture from an African-American perspective. In her series, The French Collection (1991-97), Ringgold depicted European modernism and its seminal figures from the viewpoint of a fictitious character, a remarkable young African-American woman who wants to be an artist. Her quilt story on Henri Matisse tells that artist's story from the viewpoint of his African-American model.

Late Period and Death

Ringgold's style continued to evolve as she incorporated elements from contemporary art movements while simultaneously adopting new techniques into her fabric work. In the 1990s Ringgold's style was influenced by the colors and repetitive imagery of Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, and she began using applique, with fabric sewn onto the canvas, and photo-etching. In 2000 she began to use silkscreen printing on pieces that use text and borders of fabric. Around this time, she was also continuing to champion black arts and artists, founding the Anyone Can Fly Foundation in 1999 in order to 鈥渆xpand the art establishment's canon to include artists of the African Diaspora and to introduce the Great Masters of African American Art and their art traditions to children and adult audiences鈥�

Later years offered Ringgold more opportunities to reach a larger audience, and garnered her the recognition she had so long deserved. Private collectors like Maya Angelou and Oprah Winfrey acquired her work. In 2010 her People Portraits, a series of fifty-two mosaics, was installed in the Civic center subway station in Los Angeles. In 2014 she created the billboard Groovin High as an installation piece for New York City鈥檚 High Line's train stop at 18th Street and 10th Avenue. Many of her later works were based upon her earlier story quilts. Her work, so intimately connected to her own experience as an individual in a community, has often traveled full circle to become an integral part of the community. Her work finally made it into New York鈥檚 Museum of Modern Art in 2016, when the institution acquired several of her earlier pieces, and a major retrospective of her work, Faith Ringgold: American People, was organized by the New Museum in 2022.

Ringgold passed away on April 13, 2024 at her home in Englewood, New Jersey, at the age of 93. Upon hearing of Ringgold鈥檚 passing, Beverly McIver, an artist and professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, made a statement that 鈥淎t the beginning of my career, when I was so afraid to be an artist because there were very few Black women artists recognized in the art world, it was Faith who said to me, 鈥業'm a Black woman artist and I am successful.鈥� [鈥�]That was the start of a lifelong friendship and mentorship that would mold me into the artist I am today. [鈥�] Her generous nature left such a legacy, particularly by way of her foundation, Anyone Can Fly, which helped artists of all disciplines by awarding scholarships and providing recognition to artists under the radar.鈥� In his own statement, curator and critic Hans Ulrich Obrist asserted that 鈥淔aith Ringgold is among the most important figurative and political painters of our time. Harnessing the power of storytelling to remind us of our history, she challenged perceptions of African American identity and gender inequality for over five decades. [鈥�] For Ringgold, the political was personal and the personal was political. Her philosophy that 鈥楢nyone can fly, all you gotta do is try鈥� was a testament to her perseverance and commitment as an artist and activist.鈥�

The Legacy of Faith Ringgold

Ringgold's work as an artist, an activist, and an educator influenced both the art world and communities beyond the art world. Her art has directly inspired a younger generation of Black artists who incorporate mixed-media, collage, textile/fiber, and/or quilting techniques in their work to explore themes related to identity, including Tschabalala Self, Bisa Butler, Diedrick Brackens, and Tomashi Jackson, as well as Ringgold鈥檚 former studio assistants Wendell George Brown and Grace Matthews. Recently, Brackens stated that 鈥淩inggold was an activist. Never quiet, the words and actions she left render her critical of most everything that animates the art world.鈥� He has also said of her oeuvre that 鈥淚n creating quilted works, she acknowledges that she is working in the medium our foremothers, both real and imagined, used to keep us warm, a medium that guides our aesthetics and cultural ethos, a medium that has belonged to feminist intervention in art production since the start of her career. It has often occurred to me that one of textiles鈥� most powerful allegiances is to healing. [鈥�] I think Ringgold is aware that her narrative textiles are wholly dedicated to mending, to realignment. Cloth certainly tends to our physical needs in the form of bandages, slings, and cold compresses. She uses textiles to explore psychic space and to patch and poultice our interiority. She re-images history, considers rest, and reworks worlds through cloth.鈥�

Ringgold鈥檚 founding or co-founding of many arts organizations focused on issues faced by women of color has created many opportunities for those artists. From 1988 to 1996, the Coast-to-Coast National Women Artists of Color Projects, which Ringgold co-founded, held exhibits featuring the work of women artists of color. The works of Beverly Buchanan, Elizabeth Catlett, Howardena Pindell, Adrian Piper, Deborah Willis, and Joyce Scott, among others, were featured in major exhibitions and also received critical attention in catalogues. As well, her foundation Anyone Can Fly has increased community awareness of African-American art and artists for adults and children, and created community-based venues for artistic education and expression.

As an artist, a noted children's book author, and an educator, Ringgold conducted workshops, talks, and collaborations that influenced and inspired many young people. She conducted quilt making workshops for educators, and gave talks on wuilts and storytelling with suilts and for adults and children, at the University of California, San Diego. Her 9/11 Peace Story Quilt was created in collaboration with Broadway Housing Communities youth. In 2016 she gave an Educator Studio Workshop at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Influences and Connections

Influences on Artist

Influenced by Artist

Artists

• Pablo Picasso
• Jacob Lawrence
• Romare Bearden
• Henri Matisse
• Yasuo Koniyoshi

Friends & Personal Connections

• Lucy Lippard
• Robert Blackburn
• Dindga McCannon
• Beverly McIver
• Deborah Willis

Movements & Ideas

• Historical African Art
• Harlem Renaissance
• Cubism
• Impressionism
• Folk Art

Artists

• Tschabalala Self
• Bisa Butler
• Diedrick Brackens
• Tomashi Jackson

Friends & Personal Connections

• Lucy Lippard
• Robert Blackburn
• Dindga McCannon
• Beverly McIver
• Deborah Willis

Movements & Ideas

• Identity Art and Identity Politics
• Postmodernism
• Feminist Art

Open Influences

Close Influences

Useful Resources on Faith Ringgold

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