At her Englewood, New Jersey, home, Faith Ringgold, a multimedia creator whose pictorial quilts portraying the African American experience paved the way for a second noteworthy career as a children’s book writer and illustrator, passed away on April 13, 2024, at the age of ninety-three-year-old. Her daughter Barbara Wallace had confirmed the sad passing of Ringgold.
Ms. Ringgold investigated issues of race, gender, class, family, and community for over fifty years using a wide range of mediums, including performance art, painting, sculpture, doll and mask making, textiles, and dollmaking. She has also long supported adding Black and female artists’ works to the holdings of significant American institutions.
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The artwork of Ms. Ringgold, which frequently drew inspiration from her own experiences, has been shown at galleries and museums all throughout the world in addition to the White House. The items in question may be found in the permanent collections of many prestigious institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the American Craft Museum, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York.
For Ms. Ringgold, art and activism were a cohesive, if occasionally patchworked, whole, as her work and numerous interviews demonstrated. With a background in classical painting and sculpture, she started creating politically charged works in the 1960s and 1970s that addressed the contentious issues of Black and White relations as well as relationships between men and women in the country.
2014 saw Roberta Smith, an art critic for the New York Times, evaluate an exhibition of Smith’s work at Manhattan’s ACA Galleries, “Few artists have kept as many balls in the air as long as Faith Ringgold.” Adding, “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.”
The combination of fine art supplies like paint and canvas with craft materials like fabric, beads, and thread, vivid, saturated colors, a flattened perspective that purposefully referenced the work of impressionistic painters, and an astute, frequently compassionate focus on regular Black people and the visual details of their everyday lives were among the characteristics that defined Ms. Ringgold’s style.
From the start, Ms. Ringgold’s work was commended by critics. However, she did not achieve widespread recognition until her middle years, despite being included in some of the nation’s most esteemed institutions. She frequently attributed this to her race, her sexual orientation, and her unwavering commitment to using art as a tool for social justice.
In 1992, she told The Orlando Sentinel, “In a world where having the power to express oneself or to do something is limited to a very few, art appeared to me to be an area where anyone could do that.”
“Of course, I didn’t realize at the time that you could do it and not have anyone know you were doing it.”
In the end, Ms. Ringgold gained most notoriety for her “story quilts,” which were enormous panels of unstretched canvas painted with vivid acrylic depictions of narrative situations, surrounded by more typical pieced-fabric borders, and frequently included textual elements. Designed to be hung on the wall instead of placed on a bed, the quilts celebrate the ability of people to rise above their circumstances via the creative process of dreaming, while also sharing the pleasures and hardships of Black life, especially those of Black women.
Her first children’s book, titled “Tar Beach,” was inspired by one of her most well-known narrative quilts, which she finished in 1988 and had published three years later. Like the quilt, the book features original paintings and writing by Ms. Ringgold and shows a Black family enjoying a picnic and sleeping on the roof of their Harlem apartment building on a hot summer night.
“Tar Beach” was selected as one of the year’s top illustrated children’s books by The New York Times Book Review and as a Caldecott Honor Book by the American Library Association. A favorite since childhood, it has also won several accolades, such as the Coretta Scott King Award, given by the Library Association for outstanding children’s books on African American life.
After that, Ms. Ringgold illustrated over a dozen picture books, the most of which had her own text. These included the Harriet Tubman biography “Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky” (1992) and the Rosa Parks biography “If a Bus Could Talk: The Story of Rosa Parks” (1999).
Because she never intended to become a children’s author, her prominence in the industry is all the more impressive.
Andrew Louis Jones and Willi (Posey) Jones’ youngest child, Faith On October 8, 1930, Willi Jones was born in Harlem. When Faith was around two years old, her father—a garbage truck driver in New York City—left the family, although he continued to stay in close touch.
After working as a seamstress, Faith’s mother went on to launch her own fashion brand, Mme. Willi Posey, and open an atelier in Harlem. Because of her immense success, she was able to relocate to Sugar Hill, an upscale neighborhood in Harlem that was home to Thurgood Marshall, Dinah Washington, Duke Ellington, and other notable figures.
In 2010, Ms. Ringgold stated to The Times, “We all lived together, so it wasn’t a surprise to see these people rolling up in their limos.” She further mentioned “And that said to us, you can do this, too.”
Faith was frequently stuck in bed as a youngster due to her asthma, where she used her time to paint and draw. Retrieving an easel from his garbage collection rounds, her father gave her her first one.
Growing up, Ms. Ringgold remembered her older brother Andrew’s storytelling abilities with great delight, since their family was known for its storytelling talents.
“We went to the movies at a time when there were already great stories, but they didn’t have any Black people in them — or if they did, you didn’t like the way the characters were,” In an interview with NPR, she stated “All Things Considered” in 1999. “So my brother would come home and he would rewrite everything.”
When Andrew was a teenager in the 1940s, his mother sent him on an errand to a predominantly white area in Upper Manhattan. There, he was mobbed by a group of young white people who beat him almost to death. A nearby hospital declined to treat him.
Ms. Ringgold stated that while he healed, he was never the same. He developed a heroin addiction and passed away in 1961 from an overdose.
The youthful Ms. Ringgold received her diploma from Upper Manhattan’s George Washington High School. She eloped with her childhood beau, Robert Earl Wallace when she was around twenty years old, and they quickly had two children. However, she quickly found out that her spouse, a jazz and classical pianist, was a drug addict; as a result, they split up in 1954 and became divorced two years later. (Mr. Wallace also passed away in 1961 after a heroin overdose.)
Ms. Ringgold graduated with a bachelor’s degree in art and education in 1955 and a master’s degree in art in 1959 from the City College of New York. She was married to Burdette Ringgold in 1962.
In an attempt to launch her painting career, Ms. Ringgold taught art in the public school systems of New York City from 1955 to 1973, mostly in the Bronx and Harlem neighborhoods. She began by painting landscapes in the style of the European painters she had studied in college.
“We copied Greek busts, we copied Degas, we copied everything,” In a 1990 retrospective held at the Fine Arts Museum of Long Island, which went on national tour, she stated in an interview for the catalog of “Faith Ringgold: A 25-Year Survey.” “It was generally thought that we weren’t experienced enough to be original, and if we were original we were sometimes up for ridicule.”
Gradually, Ms. Ringgold searched for a style that mirrored her own experiences and era. She had discovered it by the 1960s, thanks to the works of LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), James Baldwin, the rich visual polyphony of African art, and the rhythms of the jazz she had loved and heard as a youngster.
During this time, she created a series of portraits known as the “Black Light” series, in which she used a deliberately chosen color scheme of deep, dark hues to represent her African American clients.
It also features a 1967 painting titled “American People Series #20: Die,” which turned out to be a turning point for the artist. The 12-foot-long canvas features a furious swarm of Black and White men, women, and children, some brandishing weapons and most covered in blood. Picasso’s 1937 masterwork “Guernica” is reminiscent of the chaotic tangle of these figures.
Her first solo show, which took place at the Spectrum Gallery in New York that year, revolved around the work “Die.” Her status as an important American artist was cemented with the success of the show.
Ms. Ringgold assisted in planning a 1968 demonstration at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York by Black artists who had long been disenfranchised by the art world. She participated in a protest focused on female artists at the Museum of Modern Art two years later.
In 1995, she wrote, “Today, some 25 years later,” “nothing much has changed at the Modern except which white man gets the next show.”
The term “man” was revealing since Ms. Ringgold had long since come to feel that women who also happened to be artists benefited little from her advocacy on behalf of Black artists. She started creating more obviously feminist art by the 1970s.
After learning to sew from her mother, Ms. Ringgold started enhancing her supplies with the conventional tools used for “women’s work,” such as fabric, thread, and needles. She created soft fabric sculptures, cloth dolls, and masks, some of which were life-size. These items were utilized in her performance pieces concerning sexual and racial marginalization as well as displayed on their own.
She also started working on a series of paintings she called “Slave Rape,” which depicted the destiny of Black women in the antebellum South and were framed with patterned fabric borders.
In 1980, Ms. Ringgold worked with her mother to create “Echoes of Harlem,” a montage of stitched fabric and painted Black faces. This was her first complete quilt. It was a contemporary expression of a centuries-old Black custom.
“I think of quilts as the classic art form of Black people in America,” In 2005, Ms. Ringgold told the Allentown, Pennsylvania Morning Call. “When African slaves came to America, they couldn’t do their sculpture anymore. They were divorced from their religion. So they would take scraps of fabric and make them into coverlets for the master and for themselves.”
When Ms. Ringgold couldn’t find a publisher for a book she had written in 1983, she started adding narrative text to her quilts. It was a rare practice among painters of the day.
“Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?”, the first of her narrative quilts, reinterpreted the original stereotype of the overweight, sultry Black lady, taken straight out of a minstrel play and deemed insulting by many Black people. Jemima has been turned onto Ms. Ringgold’s quilt into a Black feminist role model who is stylish, sophisticated, and a prosperous businesswoman.
After viewing “Tar Beach,” an editor at Crown Publishers encouraged Ms. Ringgold to turn the quilt into a picture book in the late 1980s. The final piece recounts the tale of 8-year-old Cassie Lightfoot, the picnicking family’s daughter, who one amazing night in 1939 soars above the George Washington Bridge by flying over the city’s rooftops.
“I can fly — yes, fly,” The passage by Ms. Ringgold says. “Me, Cassie Louise Lightfoot, only eight years old and in the third grade, and I can fly. That means I am free to go wherever I want for the rest of my life.”
A number of private collectors, including Maya Angelou and Oprah Winfrey, purchased artwork by Ms. Ringgold. Additionally, it was commissioned for public areas, such as the Manhattan subway station located on the Lenox Avenue line at 125th Street. There, two enormous mosaic murals, jointly named “Flying Home,” honor notable Black people like as Zora Neale Hurston, Josephine Baker, and Malcolm X.
Her 2012 Martin Luther King Jr. Day Google Doodle honors the man who is most likely the most frequently used public venue of all, the internet.
Rutgers University, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, and the Studio Museum in Harlem all had noteworthy retrospectives honoring Ms. Ringgold. MoMA purchased “Die” for its permanent collection in 2016, just after she became 85 years old.
She was the subject of a significant retrospective at the New Museum in Manhattan in 2022. As Holland Cotter described it in his review for The Times, the three-floor display “makes clear that what consigned Ringgold to an outlier track half a century ago puts her front and center now.” Later, the show made its way to the Musée Picasso in Paris.
For many years, Ms. Ringgold lived in Englewood, New Jersey, and California, where she worked as a faculty member at the University of California, San Diego. She also taught in New York at the Pratt Institute, Bank Street College of Education, and other places.
She established the Anyone Can Fly Foundation in 1999 with the goal of advancing African diasporan artists’ creations from the eighteenth century onward.
A Guggenheim scholarship, painting and sculpture grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and other honorary doctorates are only a few of her numerous accolades.
Her other works include the 1995 Little, Brown & Company autobiographical “We Flew Over the Bridge.”
Ms. Ringgold leaves behind a linguist named Barbara, a well-known feminist writer and cultural critic named Michele Wallace, three granddaughters, and three great-grandchildren. Burdette Ringgold, her spouse, passed away in 2020.
Even though Ms. Ringgold had always been compelled to paint and draw, she later said that her profession was driven by a more pressing desire.
In 2008, she stated to an interviewer, “If I woke up white in America, I wouldn’t be an artist.”
