Faith Ringgold

Artist

• Born: October 8, 1930
• Place of Birth: New York, New York
• Died: April 12, 2024
• Place of Death: Englewood, New Jersey

ARTIST

Faith Ringgold was committed to challenging racial and gender inequalities in the visual arts through activism and art. She expanded notions of art and storytelling with her well-known story quilts, which focused on her own life experiences as well as the broader experiences of African Americans and women.

AREAS OF ACHIEVEMENT: Art and photography; Social issues

Early Life

Faith Ringgold was born Faith Willi Jones in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City on October 8, 1930, to Andrew Louis Jones Sr. and Willi Edell Posey. She was the youngest of three children. Her father was a truck driver for New York's Department of Sanitation, and her mother was a homemaker who would later work as a clothing designer.

Ringgold’s parents stressed the importance of education to her and her siblings, and she excelled in school, although she did not enjoy it. She began her art career creating murals as the “class artist” at her grade school. In second grade, she was asked to reproduce a scene from the American Revolution that showed George Washington’s soldiers feeding Black boys watermelon. When Ringgold told her mother about the project, Willi explained to the teacher that African Americans had fought in the American Revolution and that everyone likes watermelon. After this encounter, the mural included both Black and White boys eating watermelon.

Ringgold graduated from high school in 1948 and enrolled at City College of New York. She declared art as her major and education as her minor, even though many art professors tried to discourage her from pursuing art, and earned her bachelor’s degree in fine art and education in 1955. After finishing undergraduate studies, she taught art in the public schools of New York City while simultaneously pursing a master’s degree in art from City College, which she received in 1959.

Ringgold married her high school sweetheart, jazz pianist Robert Earl Wallace, on November 1, 1950. Within a year of marriage, the couple separated, and Ringgold moved into campus housing for Black students. She continued taking courses in the evening while looking for employment during the day. Although Ringgold and her husband were separated, they had a daughter, Michele Wallace, on January 4, 1952. With the birth of their child, Ringgold and Wallace gave their marriage another try, and they welcomed a second daughter, Barbara Wallace, on December 15, 1952. The marriage was eventually annulled in 1956 because of Earl’s drug addiction. In 1962, Ringgold married Burdette “Birdie” Ringgold, a longtime friend.

Life’s Work

The social climate of the 1960s formed the first major influence on Ringgold’s art. Her first two series of political paintings, the American People Series (1963–67) and the Black Light Series (1967–69), include works featuring the American flag, such as The Flag Is Bleeding (1967) and Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger (1969). Her art during this period was inspired by the work of writers James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka, in addition to the racial and gender-based discrimination she and others experienced.

While providing artistic commentary on social and cultural strife, Ringgold also actively protested visual arts institutions that ignored art by people of color and women. In 1968, she held a demonstration urging the Whitney Museum of American Art to showcase Black artists in exhibitions. Three years later, the Whitney included works by two Black women artists—Betye Saar and Barbara Chase-Riboud—in its sculpture biennial. Ringgold also led a demonstration urging the Museum of Modern Art to open a Black artists wing dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr.

As Ringgold worked for equality in the arts, she continued to develop as an artist, expanding her repertoire to include dolls, costumes, masks, soft sculptures, performance, printmaking, and quilts. In 1973, she presented a ten-year retrospective organized by the Voorhees Gallery at Rutgers University. The same year, after eighteen years in the New York City school system, she resigned from teaching public school and began working as a full-time artist.

Ringgold became interested in fabric-based art in 1972, when she visited a museum in Amsterdam that was showing a collection of Tibetan and Nepali thangkas (art painted or appliquéd on fabric). The exhibition inspired her to collaborate with her mother, who had by then become popular in Harlem for her clothing designs, on the Slave Rape Series (1972–73), a series of thangka paintings with quilted borders. Throughout the remainder of the 1970s, Ringgold continued to explore the artistic possibilities of fabric with sewing assistance from her mother, culminating in the creation of Ringgold's first quilt: Echoes of Harlem (1980), their final mother-daughter collaboration before Willi's death in 1981.

Ringgold returned to quilt making in 1983, producing first Mother’s Quilt and then Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima?, the latter of which incorporated text as well. This was the first of her soon-to-be-well-known story quilts; over the next decade, she continued to make quilts that chronicled both her own life experiences as well as the broader African American experience. Change 1: Weight Loss Performance Story Quilt (1986) serves as Ringgold’s autobiography, with each panel representing a decade and incorporating photographs from her life. These story quilts are a significant part of Ringgold’s portfolio and perhaps her best-known works of art.

Ringgold soon expanded her talent for storytelling to include writing children’s books. Her first book, Tar Beach (1991), tells the story of her youth in the city and having picnics on the rooftops of brownstones. It received many honors, including the 1992 Caldecott Honor and a 1992 Coretta Scott King Award for Ringgold’s illustration work, and was named one of the New York Times’ best illustrated children’s books of the year.

In 1997, Ringgold was awarded two honorary doctorates, a PhD from Molloy College on Long Island and a doctorate of education from Wheelock College in Boston. She was further honored in 2007 when the Hayward Unified School District in Hayward, California, opened the Faith Ringgold School of Arts & Sciences, a nontraditional elementary school that emphasizes the sciences as well as both visual and performing arts. During the 2010s, Ringgold's art experienced a resurgence in popularity amid the Black Lives Matter movement, as her earlier works were put on display at several major museums, including the Tate Museum of London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and the Bildmuseet in Sweden. She had her first European exhibition in 2019 at the Serpentine Galleries in London, England, where visitors viewed some of her most powerful works, including her canvas paintings and quilts.

Museums and art institutions around the world continued to celebrate Ringgold's works into the 2020s. In 2022, the New Museum in New York featured a retrospective exhibition of her most well-known works cultivated over her decades-long career. The exhibition, titled Faith Ringgold: American People, spanned across three floors and later traveled to the De Young Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco in California, the Musée Picasso in Paris, France, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Illinois.

Ringgold died at the age of ninety-three at her home in Englewood, New Jersey, on the evening of April 12, 2024. Ringgold's husband, Burdette, died in 2020.

Significance

An artist of diverse talents and accomplishments, Ringgold spent many years fighting for equal access for women and artists of color in art museums. She worked to combat racial and sexual discrimination through her art. Ringgold’s long career in the visual arts included roles as artist, curator, activist, writer, and educator.

Bibliography

"About Faith." Faith Ringgold, 2024, www.faithringgold.com/about-faith/. Accessed 17 Apr. 2024.

Cotter, Holland. “An Era’s Injustices Fuel an Artist’s Activist Works.” The New York Times, 9 Dec. 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/arts/design/10ringgold.html. Accessed 8 Apr. 2016.

"Faith Ringgold, Pioneering Black Quilt Artist and Author, Dies at 93." Associated Press, 13 Apr. 2024, apnews.com/article/faith-ringgold-dead-d246c574578149b49edb5f612fd8310f. Accessed 17 Apr. 2024.

Farrington, Lisa E. Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists. Oxford UP, 2005.

Farrington, Lisa E. Faith Ringgold. San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2004. Print. David C. Driskell Ser. of African Amer. Art 3.

Fox, Margalit. "Faith Ringgold Dies at 93; Wove Black Life into Quilts and Children’s Books." The New York Times, 13 Apr. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/04/13/arts/faith-ringgold-dead.html. Accessed 16 Apr. 2024.

Holton, Curlee Raven, and Faith Ringgold. Faith Ringgold: A View from the Studio. Bunker Hill, 2004.

Morris, Bob. "Faith Ringgold Will Keep Fighting Back." The New York Times, 12 June 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/arts/design/faith-ringgold-art.html. Accessed 20 July 2021.

Patton, Sharon F. African-American Art. Oxford UP, 1998.

Ringgold, Faith. We Flew over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold. Bulfinch, 1995.

Russeth, Andrew. “The Storyteller: At 85, Her Star Still Rising, Faith Ringgold Looks Back on Her Life in Art, Activism, and Education.” ARTnews. ARTnews, 1 Mar. 2016. Web. 8 Apr. 2016.

Topalova, Viktoriya M. “Ringgold, Faith (1930–).” Encyclopedia of Women's Autobiography, edited by Victoria Boynton and Jo Malin, vol. 2, Greenwood, 2005, pp. 485–87.