Faith Ringgold, Maker of ‘Story Quilts’, Dies Aged 93
Ringgold blazed a trail for Black women artists in America, depicting their experiences through 'outsider' approaches including the use of textiles and a deliberately naive painting style.
Faith Ringgold. Courtesy ACA Galleries.
Artist Faith Ringgold, best known for her painted canvases bordered by quilt work, died at home in New Jersey on Saturday 13 April.
ACA Galleries, who has represented the artist in New York since 1995, confirmed the news.
'Faith leaves behind an impactful legacy of activism and advocacy for diversity and inclusion that has left a lasting mark on the art world, inspiring countless others to use their voice as a tool for social change,' said ACA's president Dorian Bergen.
Ringgold was born in Harlem, New York, in 1930 to a sanitation truck driver and a seamstress who later established her own successful fashion label. As a teenager, her brother, Andrew, was attacked and nearly beaten to death by white youths on an errand that took him to Upper Manhattan. Unflinching depictions of violence would later feature in her work.
Ringgold studied art and education at the City College of New York, receiving a masters in 1959. She taught art in the city's public schools while painting her own works.
Her 1967 painting American People Series #20: Die was a breakthrough, appearing in her first solo show, held at Spectrum Gallery in New York. The 12-foot-long canvas uses a naive style to depict 13 bloody people—white and black, men, women, and children—caught in a moment of carnage.
Other works were similarly confronting, including the 1972 'Slave Rape' series, her first works to include quilted borders.
Ringgold became best known for what she called 'story quilts'—painted canvases framed by quilted fabric and augmented with text, which Ringgold introduced after failing to find a publisher for her memoir.
'I think of quilts as the classic art form of Black people in America', Ringgold said in an interview in 2005.
Describing her practice to Ocula on the occasion of a survey show at the New Museum in 2022, she said, 'All of my work is autobiographical to a certain extent. I recorded my experiences as a Black woman artist—what I witnessed, the people I met, and current events in the world and in my community.'
Though she toiled at the margins of the art world for many years, Ringgold ultimately entered the collections of America's biggest art museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
'Taken as a whole,' Vivian Chui wrote on Ocula, 'Ringgold's practice broke down formidable barriers and paved the way for scores of younger artists—among them, Diedrick Brackens and Tschabalala Self...—who have not only embraced textiles as their medium, but carried on Ringgold's legacy in portraying Blackness with nuance and clarity.' —[O]
