Faith Ringgold (1930–2024)

Trailblazing artist, activist, illustrator, and author Faith Ringgold, who was widely renowned for her elaborate pictorial quilts documenting Black life, died April 13 at her home in Englewood, New Jersey. She was ninety-three. Ringgold explored issues including race, class, gender, and community through a variety of media including doll-making, mask-making, sculpture, performance art, and paint, which she applied to a diversity of unique and occasionally unexpected surfaces. A tireless advocate for fellow Black and women artists, she was instrumental in getting their works into museum collections, visibly and vocally pressuring institutions to include them. Despite the incandescent and undimming arc of her seven-decade career, continually marked by breathtaking forays into new modes of making, Ringgold did not begin to achieve the recognition she was due until the 2010s, a fact that underscored the challenges she faced as a Black woman artist. “No other creative field is as closed to those who are not white and male as is the visual arts,” shesaid. “After I decided to be an artist, the first thing that I had to believe was that I, a black woman, could penetrate the art scene, and that, further, I could do so without sacrificing one iota of my blackness or my femaleness or my humanity.”

Faith Ringgold was born on October 8, 1930, in New York, the youngest of three children. Her father, a sanitation truck driver and an accomplished storyteller, separated from her mother when she was still a toddler, though he remained in her life. Ringgold was raised by her mother, a fashion designer, amid the creative milieu of the Harlem Renaissance. Suffering from chronic asthma, she turned to art as a child, encouraged in her efforts by her mother, who additionally taught her to sew. After graduating from the City College of New York with a degree in art history—female students there were not allowed to major in fine art at that time—in 1955, Ringgold, now married to a jazz pianist and the mother of two children, began teaching in the public school system. She would go on to obtain her master’s degree in 1959.

Ringgold began her career as an artist in the 1950s, initially painting landscapes in a Western European style. By the ’60s, now married to auto worker Burdette Ringgold, and fully engaged with her own cultural upbringing, the civil rights movement, and the writing of James Baldwin and LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), she had found her own voice and had begun painting works that investigated the realities of Black life in the United States. “I could not act like everything was okay,” she toldHyperallergicin 2019. Her “American People” series, 1963–67, traces the emotional path of the civil rights movement, from its early bright promise to the tragic violence embodied for example in the street battles over desegregation and in the assassination of Malcom X. Her “Black Light” series, 1967–69, is duskier in hue overall, as the artist sought to step away from the Western European trope of centering brightness, light, and chiaroscuro: Ringgold noted that “African cultures, in general used darker colors and emphasized color rather than tonality to create contrast,” a practice she embraced in order to create a “more affirmative Black aesthetic.” Writing on the series in a 2013 issue ofArtforum, Beau Rutland acknowledged the power of this decision. “‘Protest art’ is often identified through its explicit subject matter, yet Ringgold’s production goes further—visually signifying her protest and physically embodying it as well,” he wrote. “This limiting structural tenet imbues the paintings with a palpable density, as if the nails they’re hanging on might buckle under their weight.”

The artist during the 1960s was also an active protester, as she would remain, in some form or another, all her life. In 1968, alongside artist Poppy Johnson and critic Lucy Lippard, she organized the Ad Hoc Women’s Art Committee, which protested a modernist survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, demanding that the institution include at least 50 percent women in the exhibition. Shortly thereafter, Ringgold cofounded Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation, the National Black Feminist Organization, and “Where We At” Black Women Artists, this last organization affiliated with the Black Art Movement. Her efforts to inspire and gain a place in the arts for Black people and women didn’t end with the white cube; in 1971, she painted the muralFor the Women’s Housein the women’s detention house on Riker’s Island, dedicating it to the women imprisoned there. Her effort led to the founding of Art Without Walls, an organization that brings art to incarcerated populations.

In the 1970s, inspired by a trip to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where she saw fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Nepali fabric paintings, she moved away from Western European traditions and toward soft sculptures, thangkas, and masks. Her “Slave Rape” series of the early 1980s, illustrating the experience of an enslaved African woman, especially responded to the Nepali paintings, in that the works, made on unstretched canvas, could similarly be easily rolled up for transport, and carried by the artist herself. Ringgold’s interest in masks was spurred further by her inaugural visits, late in the decade, to Ghana and Nigeria. Intending them to be worn rather than merely regarded, she ultimately brought them into play in her performance works of the ’70s and ’80s

The 1980s saw Ringgold, frustrated by her inability to get a memoir published, make her landmark foray into painted story quilts, beginning withEchoes of Harlem, 1980, made in collaboration with her mother and depicting thirty residents of the area.Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima, 1983, dispatched with the dehumanizing “mammy” stereotype of the titular character, then the symbol of a syrup brand, recasting its subject as a svelte and prosperous businesswoman. The artist’sChange: Faith Ringgold’s Over 100 Pounds Weight Loss Performance Story Quilt, 1986, depicts her battle with cultural physical norms and her desire—and lack thereof—to hew to them. Her series “The French Collection,” 1991–97, limns the story of a young Black woman who leaves Harlem to live in Paris as an artist and model. One work from the series,The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, 1996, depicts a group of African American women making a sunflower-patterned quilt while Vincent van Gogh, historically lauded for his own works centering the bloom, looks on from a distance.

Ringgold’s quilts figured in several of her many children’s books, including Tar Beach (1991), in which a young girl, escaping the heat on a summer night with her family atop an apartment building roof, takes flight among the stars; the book won a Caldecott Honor and was lauded by the New York Times Book Review as one of the year’s best illustrated children’s books. Dinner at Aunt Connie’s (1993) was based on her 1986 quilt The Dinner Quilt, which portrays a dozen notable African American women; in the book, they come alive and tell their stories to two small children. Her autobiography We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold was published in 1995.

Ringgold over the course of her life was the subject of a number of major retrospectives, including those, most recently, at London’s Serpentine Galleries (that one traveled to the Bildmuseet in Umea, Sweden) and at New York’s New Museum (the show traveled to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago). Her work is held in the collections of numerous major institutions around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, all in New York; the Boston Museum of Fine Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Glenstone; the National Museum of Art, Washington, DC; the High Museum, Atlanta; and the Victoria and Albert Museum of Art, London.