2023: 1930 Chronology: Appendix 27: Faith Ringgold, Painter, Sculptor, Author, Performance Artist, and Civil Rights Activist

Appendix 27

 Faith Ringgold

 Painter, Sculptor, Author, Performance Artist

 and 

Civil Rights Activist

Faith Ringgold (b. October 8, 1930, New York, New York - d. April 13, 2024, Englewood, New Jersey), was an artist and author who became famous for innovative, quilts that communicate her political beliefs.

Faith Ringgold was born the youngest of three children on October 8, 1930, in Harlem Hospital, New York City. Her parents, Andrew Louis Jones and Willi Posey Jones, were descendants of working-class families displaced by the Great Migration.  Ringgold's mother, a fashion designer, and her father, an avid storyteller, raised their daughter in an environment that encouraged her creativity. After the Harlem Renaissance, Ringgold's childhood home in Harlem became surrounded by a thriving arts scene - where figures such as Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes lived just around the corner. Her childhood friend, Sonny Rollins, who would grow up to be a prominent jazz musician, often visited her family and practiced saxophone at their parties.  Because of her chronic asthma, Ringgold explored visual art as a major pastime through the support of her mother, often experimenting with crayons as a young girl. She also learned how to sew and work creatively with fabric from her mother.  Ringgold's future artwork was greatly affected by the people, poetry, and music she experienced in her childhood, as well as by the racism, sexism, and segregation she dealt with in her everyday life.

In 1950, due to pressure from her family, Ringgold enrolled at the City College of New York to major in art, but was forced to major in art education instead, as City College only allowed women to be enrolled in certain majors.  The same year, she also married a jazz pianist named Robert Earl Wallace and had two children, Michele and Barbara Faith Wallace. Ringgold and Wallace separated four years later due to his heroin addiction. In the meantime, she studied with artists Robert Gwathmey and Yasuo Kuniyoshi.  She was also introduced to printmaker Robert Blackburn, with whom she would collaborate on a series of prints 30 years later.

In 1955, Ringgold received her bachelor's degree from City College and soon afterward taught in the New York City public school system. In 1959, she received her master's degree from City College and left with her mother and daughters on her first trip to Europe. While travelling abroad in Paris, Florence, and Rome, Ringgold visited many museums, including the Louvre. This museum in particular inspired her future series of quilt paintings known as the French Collection. This trip was abruptly cut short, however, due to the untimely death of her brother in 1961. Faith Ringgold, her mother, and her daughters all returned to the United States for his funeral. She subsequently married Burdette Ringgold on May 19, 1962.

By the 1960s, her work had matured, reflecting her burgeoning political consciousness, study of African arts and history, and appreciation for the freedom of form used by her young students.

In 1963, Ringgold began a body of paintings called the American People series, which portrays the civil rights movement from a female perspective. In the 1970s she created African-style masks, painted political posters, lectured frequently at feminist art conferences, and actively sought the racial integration of the New York art world. She originated a demonstration against the Whitney Museum of American Art and helped win admission for black artists to the exhibit schedule at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1970 she co-founded, with one of her daughters, the advocacy group Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation. 

Ringgold visited West Africa twice: once in 1976 and again in 1977.  These travels would deeply influence her mask making, doll painting and sculptures.

Among Ringgold's most renowned works, her "story quilts:" were inspired by the Tibetan tankos (paintings framed in cloth) that she viewed on a visit to museums in Amsterdam.  She painted these quilts with narrative images and original stories set in the context of African American history.  Her mother frequently collaborated with he  r on these.  Examples of this work includes Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima? (1984), Sonny's  (1986), and Tar Beach (1988), which Ringgold adapted into a children's book in 1991.  The latter book, which was named a Caldecott Honor Book in 1992, tells of a young black girl in New York City who dreams about flying.  Ringgold's later books for children include Aunt Harriet's Underground Railroad in the Sky (1992) and My Dream of Martin Luther King (1995).  Her memoirs, We Flew over the Bridge, were published in 1995.