Faith Ringgold is a Black painter, muralist, performance artist, author, mixed-media sculptor, printmaker, and quilt maker who is also an activist for civil rights and feminist causes. Her imagery is community oriented, being colourful with lots of portraits and local narrative.
Read MoreRaised in Brooklyn, Ringgold learnt sewing, stitching, and quilting skills from her mother. In 1950 she enrolled at the City College of New York where she studied art education, gaining a Bachelor's degree in 1955 and—after starting to teach in public schools—a Master's in 1959. That year Ringgold, her daughters from an early marriage, and her mother toured Europe, allowing Ringgold to visit municipal and national galleries and research collections. Later she travelled to West Africa to look at masks and other sculpture.
Faith Ringgold's art practice is extremely varied in its use of assorted methods and media. She began exhibiting paintings in the 1950s, making works inspired by James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, African art, Cubism, and Impressionism. The shapes were flat, clinging to the picture plane, and the content not as overtly political as what was to come after 1963, when civil rights became a focus.
Spurred on by Baldwin's writing, the earlier paintings of Jacob Lawrence, and the turbulent nature of the times, she created the 'American People' series, where she promoted both civil rights and feminist issues through her critiquing imagery, which in its textures became formally more modulated.
In 1970, as a contributing artist to The People's Flag Show at Judson Memorial Church in New York, Ringgold was arrested for desecrating the American flag. Later works that continue this theme of combating repressive legislation include The Flag Is Bleeding #2 (American Collection #6) (1997).
In the early 1970s Ringgold began to stop working on conventional paintings and started making unstretched acrylic-on-canvas works with fabric borders that were related to Tibetan thangka silk paintings. These she enlarged to quilt size, and in 1983 she combined handwritten text with the images to express storytelling narratives. The first was Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima (1983).
In the 1970s, Ringgold with her mother also began making masks of raffia and fabric inspired by African tribal costume, and large, life-sized, stuffed dolls to be used in performances such as The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro (1976), which incorporated singing, music, and dance.
In the early 1990s with her Tar Beach quilts, woodcuts, and book from the series 'Women on a Bridge', Ringgold created Cassie Louise Lightfoot, an eight-year-old African-American girl living in Harlem. She is shown flying high about the rooftops like an angel in a quattrocento painting.
Ringgold is the recipient of a Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowship for painting, two National Endowment for the Arts Awards, and 23 honorary doctorates. She is Professor Emerita at the University of California San Diego.
Faith Ringgold has been the subject of many solo and group exhibitions.
Recent solo exhibitions include Faith Ringgold: Paintings and Story Quilts 1964—2017, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2018); Faith Ringgold: The Seventies, ACA Galleries, New York (2018); Faith Ringgold's AMERICA: Early Works and Story Quilts, ACA Galleries, New York (2013).
Recent group exhibitions include Artwise Wrapped, Artwise, Brooklyn (2021); Out of Body, The Brodsky Centre at PAFA, Philadelphia (2021); Designing Women III, Egg Collective, New York (2021); Jacob Lawrence and Black Contemporaries, Artwise, Brooklyn (2020); In Stitches, Larsen Warner, Stockholm (2020).
Ringgold's artworks are included in the collections of major institutions throughout the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Baltimore Museum of Art; and Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Ringgold's website can be found here, and her Instagram here.
John Hurrell | Ocula | 2022
