Faith Ringgold (1930 - 2024) was born in New York City, and while working as an art teacher in public schools and drawing on her classical training as a painter and sculptor, she began a series of paintings called “American People,” which portrayed the civil rights movement from a female perspective. For more than 50 years, she explored themes of race, gender, class, family, and community through various media, including painting, sculpture, African-style mask- and doll-making, textiles, and performance art. She was also a longtime advocate of bringing the work of Black people and women into the collections of major American museums.
During the 1980s, she began a series of “story quilts” that are among her best-known works, made of unstretched canvas, painted with narrative scenes and framed by borders of pieced fabric and often incorporating written text. She later embarked on a successful career as a children's book author and illustrator, including such well-known titles as Tar Beach (a Caldecott Honor Book and named one of 1988’s best illustrated children’s titles by The New York Times Book Review); Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky (1992), about Harriet Tubman; and If a Bus Could Talk: The Story of Rosa Parks (1999).
Ringgold’s works have been exhibited at the White House and in museums and galleries around the world. It is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the American Craft Museum in New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and other institutions.
“Few artists have kept as many balls in the air as long as Faith Ringgold,” the New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote in 2013, reviewing an exhibition of her work at ACA Galleries in Manhattan. “She has spent more than five decades juggling message and form, high and low, art and craft, inspirational narrative and quiet or not so quiet fury about racial and sexual inequality.”
According to The New York Times, the hallmarks of Ms. Ringgold’s style included the integration of craft materials like fabric, beads and thread with fine-art materials like paint and canvas; vibrant, saturated colors; a flattened perspective that deliberately evoked the work of naïve painters; and a keen, often tender focus on ordinary Black people and the visual minutiae of their daily lives.
Portrait source: theguardian.com
