Faith Ringgold
Faith Ringgold was a painter, quilt-maker, activist, and author, whose career of over six decades addressed acts of erasure and violence as part of anti-racist and feminist politics. She is especially known for her story quilts, which combine personal narratives, history, and politics, to share her experiences as an African-American woman living in New York. Ringgold completed undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at City College of New York (1955 and 1959). Her first body of works, The American People Series (1963–67), addressed racial tensions during the Civil Rights era. In the 1970s, Ringgold began to embrace feminism and anti-racism through activist means, including co-leading the Black caucus of the Art Worker’s Coalition who protested outside the Museum of Modern Art in New York to demand equal gender and racial representation. The same decade saw her transition from oil painting to textile works. Ringgold began to produce story quilts and children’s books from the mid-1980s. The most famous of her twenty-three children’s books is Tar Beach (1991), for which she received the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award and the Coretta Scott King Award for illustration. Ringgold taught at several schools and universities, and held Honorary Doctorates in both America and the UK. Her memoirs were published in 1995.
Further Reading
Blanchflower, Melissa, and Natalia Grabowska with Melissa Larner (eds.). Faith Ringgold. London: Koenig Books, 2019.
Gioni, Massimiliano, and Gary Carrion-Murayari (eds.). Faith Ringgold: American People. Phaidon Press, 2022.
Ringgold, Faith. We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Selected Collections
The Art Institute of Chicago
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
