Faith Ringgold
Faith Ringgold was an American painter, author, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, and intersectional activist, perhaps best known for her narrative quilts.
Ringgold was born in Harlem, New York City, and earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from the City College of New York. She was an art teacher in the New York City public school system. As a multimedia artist, her works explored themes of family, race, class, and gender. Her series of story quilts, designed from the 1980s on, captured the experiences of Black Americans and became her signature art form. During her career, she promoted the work of Black artists and rallied against their marginalization by the art museums. She wrote and illustrated over a dozen children's books. Ringgold's art has been exhibited throughout the world and is in the permanent collections of The Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Early life
Faith Willi Jones was born the youngest of three children on October 8, 1930, in Harlem Hospital, New York City. Her parents, Andrew Louis Jones and Willi Posey Jones, were descendants of working-class families displaced by the Great Migration. Ringgold's mother was a fashion designer and her father, as well as working a range of jobs, was an avid storyteller. They raised her in an environment that encouraged her creativity. After the Harlem Renaissance, Ringgold's childhood home in Harlem became surrounded by a thriving arts scene—where figures such as Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes lived just around the corner. Her childhood friend Sonny Rollins, who became a prominent jazz musician, often visited her family and practiced saxophone at their parties.Because of her chronic asthma, Ringgold explored visual art as a major pastime through the support of her mother, often experimenting with crayons as a young girl. She also learned how to sew and work creatively with fabric from her mother. Ringgold maintained that despite her upbringing in Great Depression–era Harlem, 'this did not mean was poor and oppressed'—she was 'protected from oppression and surrounded by a loving family.' With all of these influences combined, Ringgold's future artwork was greatly affected by the people, poetry, and music she experienced in her childhood, as well as the racism, sexism, and segregation she dealt with in her everyday life.
In 1948, due to pressure from her family, Ringgold enrolled at the City College of New York to major in art, but was forced to major in art education instead, as City College only allowed women to be enrolled in certain majors. In 1950, she married a jazz pianist named Robert Earl Wallace and had two children, Michele and Barbara Faith Wallace, in 1952. Ringgold and Wallace separated four years later due to his heroin addiction. In the meantime, she studied with artists Robert Gwathmey and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. She was also introduced to printmaker Robert Blackburn, with whom she would collaborate on a series of prints 30 years later.
In 1955, Ringgold received her bachelor's degree from City College and soon afterward taught in the New York City public school system. In 1959, she received her master's degree from City College and left with her mother and daughters on her first trip to Europe. While traveling abroad in Paris, Florence, and Rome, Ringgold visited many museums, including the Louvre. This museum in particular inspired her future series of quilt paintings known as The French Collection. This trip was abruptly cut short, however, due to the untimely death of her brother in 1961. Ringgold, her mother, and her daughters all returned to the United States for his funeral. She married Burdette Ringgold on May 19, 1962.
Ringgold visited West Africa twice: once in 1976 and again in 1977. These travels deeply influenced her mask making, doll painting, and sculptures.
Artwork
Ringgold's artistic practice was extremely varied—from painting to quilts, from sculptures and performance art to children's books. As an educator, she taught in both the New York City Public school system and at college level. In 1973, she quit teaching public school to devote herself to creating art full-time. In 1995, she was approached by ACA Galleries for exclusive representation and was represented by them for the rest of her life.Painting
Ringgold began her painting career in the 1950s after receiving her degree. Her early work is composed with flat figures and shapes. She was inspired by the writings of James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka, African art, Impressionism, and Cubism to create the works she made in the 1960s. Though she received a great deal of attention with these images, many of her early paintings focused on the underlying racism in everyday activities; which made sales difficult, and disquieted galleries and collectors. These works were also politically based and reflected her experiences growing up during the Harlem Renaissance—themes which matured during the Civil Rights Movement and Women's movement.Taking inspiration from artist Jacob Lawrence and writer James Baldwin, Ringgold painted her first political collection named the American People Series in 1963, which portrays the American lifestyle in relation to the Civil Rights Movement. American People Series illustrates these racial interactions from a female point of view, and calls basic racial issues in the United States of America into question. In a 2019 article with Hyperallergic magazine, Ringgold explained that her choice for a political collection comes from the turbulent atmosphere around her: " it was the 1960s and I could not act like everything was okay. I couldn't paint landscapes in the 1960s—there was too much going on. This is what inspired the American People Series." This revelation stemmed from her work being rejected by Ruth White, a gallery owner in New York. Oil paintings like For Members Only, Neighbors, Watching and Waiting, and The Civil Rights Triangle also embody these themes.
In 1972, as part of a commission sponsored by the Creative Artists Public Service Program, Ringgold installed For the Women's House in the Women's Facility on Rikers Island. The large-scale mural is an anti-carceral work, composed of depictions of women in professional and civil servant roles, representing positive alternatives to incarceration. The women portrayed are inspired by extensive interviews Ringgold conducted with women inmates, and the design divides the portraits into triangular sections—referencing Kuba textiles of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It was her first public commission and widely regarded as her first feminist work. Subsequently, the work inspired the creation of Art Without Walls, an organization that brings art to prisons.
Around the opening of her show for American People, Ringgold also worked on her collection called America Black, in which she experimented with darker colors. This was spurred by her observation that "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." This led her to pursue "a more affirmative black aesthetic". Her American People series concluded with larger-scale murals, such as The Flag is Bleeding, U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Advent of Black Power People, and Die. These murals lent her a fresher and stronger prospective to her future artwork.
Her piece, Black Light Series #10: Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger, 1969—which was created in response to the first image of the Apollo 11 Moon landing—was to be purchased by the Chase Manhattan Bank, after Ringgold's work caught the attention of David Rockefeller, the chief executive of the bank. He sent a couple of representatives to buy a piece, and they realized, only after the artist suggested they actually read the text on her work, that the stars and stripes of the American flag as depicted also optically incorporated the phrase "DIE NIGGER". The representatives instead purchased Black Light #9: American Spectrum. In 2013, Black Light Series #10: Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger was shown in the artist's solo exhibition at ACA Galleries in New York, where it was highlighted by the artist and critic Paige K. Bradley in the first solo show coverage Ringgold had ever received from Artforum up until then, preceding Beau Rutland's own review two months later. The piece Black Light #1: Big Black, from 1967, is included in the permanent collection of Pérez Art Museum Miami.
During the 1970s she also made a "Free Angela" poster design for the Black Panthers. Although it was never widely produced Ringgold stated that she had given a copy of the design to Angela Davis herself.
In terms of the place of painting in her practice as whole, the artist considered it her "primary means of expression," as she noted in an interview on the occasion of a retrospective at the New Museum in New York City, from 2022. She went on to note: "My work is always autobiographical—it's about what is happening at the time. I always do what is honest to me. I think all artists should try to be knowledgeable about the world and express feelings about what they're observing, what's important to them. My advice is: Find your voice and don't worry about what other people think."
Quilts and other textiles
Ringgold stated she switched from painting to fabric to get away from the association of painting with Western European traditions. She turned to textile, fiber arts, and mixed media assemblages as a means of both engaging with African sources associated with the Black Arts movement and the "craft" media associated with the feminist movement. The use of textiles like quilts also gave Ringgold the autonomy advocated by the feminist movement: she could simply roll up her quilts to take to the gallery, therefore negating the need of any assistance from her husband.Ringgold's initial inspiration to incorporate this kind of media into her own work came, however, from outside the Black Arts and feminist art movements. In the summer of 1972, Ringgold travelled to Europe with her daughter Michele. While Michele went to visit friends in Spain, Ringgold continued on to Germany and the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, she visited the Rijksmuseum, which became one of the most influential experiences affecting her mature work, and subsequently, led to the development of her quilt paintings. In the museum, Ringgold encountered a collection of 14th- and 15th-century Tibetan thangkas, which inspired her to produce fabric borders around her own work.
Ringgold created her first thangka-inspired works with the Feminist series. Each of the vertically-oriented works in this series consisted of an unstretched painted scene, centered on an abstracted landscape, that was framed with a fabric border. Ringgold paired the landscape with a quote drawn from the anthology Black Women in White America. Statements by African-American women like Shirley Chisholm and Sojourner Truth emphasized gender prejudice as stronger than racial prejudice. The Slave Rape Series was another set of works echoing the format and materials of the thangka. In these works, Ringgold took the perspective of an African woman captured and sold into slavery. Her mother, Willi Posey, collaborated with her on this project, as Posey was a popular Harlem clothing designer and seamstress during the 1950s and taught Ringgold how to quilt in the African-American tradition. This collaboration eventually led to their first quilt, Echoes of Harlem, in 1980. Ringgold was also taught the art of quilting in an African-American style by her grandmother, who had in turn learned it from her mother, Susie Shannon, who was a slave.
Ringgold quilted her stories to be heard, since at the time no one would publish the autobiography she had been working on; making her work both autobiographical and artistic. In an interview with the Crocker Art Museum she stated, "In 1983, I began writing stories on my quilts as an alternative. That way, when my quilts were hung up to look at, or photographed for a book, people could still read my stories." Her first quilt story Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima? depicts the story of Aunt Jemima as a matriarch restaurateur and fictionally revises "the most maligned black female stereotype." Another piece, titled Change: Faith Ringgold's Over 100 Pounds Weight Loss Performance Story Quilt, engages the topic of "a woman who wants to feel good about herself, struggling to cultural norms of beauty, a person whose intelligence and political sensitivity allows her to see the inherent contradictions in her position, and someone who gets inspired to take the whole dilemma into an artwork".
The series of story quilts from Ringgold's French Collection explores France, which was central to the emergence of modernism and modern art, as a place where African-American artists could find their own "modern" identity. Each quilt features an episode in the life of a fictional black woman painter, Willia Marie Simone.Sunflowers Quilting Bee at Arles features historical African-American women who dedicated themselves to fighting oppression and changing the world. In other quilts from the series, Simone is shown posing nude for modernist artists Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, but also turns the tables in Picnic at Giverny, in which she paints a nude Picasso while accompanied by contemporary women who, like Ringgold, were working to increase women's participation in the art world. The series calls out and challenges the male gaze, and illustrates the immersive power of historical fantasy and childlike imaginative storytelling. Many of Ringgold's quilts went on to inspire the children's books that she later made, such as Tar Beach and Dinner at Aunt Connie's House published by Hyperion Books, based on The Dinner Quilt. Tar Beach, the first of Ringgold's children's books, won many awards, including the Caldecott Honor book award and the Coretta Scott King Award for illustration.
Ringgold followed The French Collection with The American Collection, a series of quilts that continues the narrative from The French Collection.