Faith Ringgold, 1930-2024

By Zachary Vincent

Street Story Quilt, 1985, unstreched canvas, paint, and cotton fabric. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Faith Ringgold was a hard-worker, a dreamer, and a celebrator. Her art expresses joy, optimism, anger, sorrow, respect, and a sincere understanding of United States of America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She was a sculptor, a painter, a writer, a seamstress, an activist, a teacher, a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend, a woman, an African American, an artist. From her birth in Harlem, New York on 8th October 1930 to her death earlier this year, Ringgold filled an unimaginable number of positions and left a legacy as profound and varied as her life and practice. This poses a challenge to would-be biographers, especially ones tasked with the capturing of the artist as an individual and their work in only a few hundred words. It is through a selection of her works that this tribute will seek a view of Faith Ringgold which is as complete as possible, which balances the individual, the art, and the legacy of a person who was, above all else, remarkable and real.

Street Story Quilt (1985) is epic narrative at its most condensed. A building is presented to viewers three times, before, during, and after a fire. The bonds of family and community, the safety represented by the home, a vision of stability, are established, tested, and and tentatively reasserted by Ringgold. The active nature of the piece invites reflection of Ringgold’s own actions in her lifetime. The medium she chose for Street Story is a ‘story quilt’, an invention of the artist. Unstretched canvas is painted, quilted, and bordered with fabric and narrative text. Ringgold’s creativity, inspired by encounters with unstretched canvas in the form of traditional Tibetan tankas, was a response to circumstance as much as an act of the mind. She incorporated text into her art after she faced discrimination in book publishing due to her gender and race. She created her American People (1963-67) series to protest inequality in, among other places, museums (including the MoMa and the Whitney galleries) and other art institutions. She chose to create quilts because it had been an act of protest honed by so many who came before the artist herself. From the street, the perspective of a passer-by or a newspaper-reader, Ringgold embodied the principles for which her art advocated: resilience, commitment, invention, and defiance.

Woman on a Bridge #1 of 5: Tar Beach, 1988, unstretched canvas, paint, and cotton fabric. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

If Street Story is active and alert, Tar Beach (1988) is a dream. Ensconcing a scene of cool, evening dining al fresco in a collection of warm-hued cotton fabrics promotes an air of comforting domesticity accessible in the memories of every viewer who has had a happy home. Another story quilt, Tar Beach lends access to Faith Ringgold’s more internal world. Family was important to the artist and allowed her, like her featured character Cassie Louise Lightfoot, to fly. It was Ringgold’s mother, Willi ‘Posey’ Jones, who inspired her from a young age to reach for success with a solid grounding of family and self-belief. Jones was a successful fashion designer able to lift her family up through Harlem’s socio-economic classes, teaching young Faith about dreams along the way. Dreams are a theme in Ringgold’s work, whether they be of a better nation, of a happy family, of the empowerment of women, or of flying. A eulogist of Ringgold’s described her art as “celebrating the human capacity to transcend circumstance through the art of dreaming”. Whether Ringgold attempted to “transcend” circumstance or to use it, her art nevertheless celebrated the most important parts of the American Dream: having a dream and having people to dream it with. In the children’s book which she would eventually write inspired by her quilt, also called Tar Beach, Ringgold reminded us that “anyone can fly. All you need is somewhere to go that you can’t get to any other way. The next thing you know, you’re flying among the stars.”

Faith Ringgold was the recipient of numerous awards and featured in successful exhibitions across the globe. Her works have been acquired by celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Maya Angelou, as well as by renowned institutions like New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim. She published more than twenty children’s books in her lifetime and taught extensively in the New York public school system and at the University of California San Diego as a faculty member. These facts demonstrate the legacy of Ringgold, but give limited insight into the person she was. Biography treads a thin line between focusing on individuals and on the fruits of their labours, something to remember as HASTA’s Born This Week section begins another year of publishing. Faith Ringgold provides a reminder that artist biographies and art will always inform each other, and that the richest view into the world of creative production must balance both. Such is the only way to honour a legacy as rich as Ringgold’s and to promote art which continues to encourage us to protest, to practice resilience, and to dream.

Bibliography

“About Faith”. Faith Ringgold. Accessed 1st October, 2024. https://www.faithringgold.com/about-faith/.

Fox, Margalit. “Faith Ringgold Dies at 93; Wove Black Life Into Quilts and Children’s Books”. The New York Times. 13th April, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/13/arts/faith-ringgold-dead.html.

Henderson, Robbin Légère. “10 x 10: Ten Women / Ten Prints”. 1995. Accessed 1st October, 2024. https://www.berkeleyartcenter.org/10-x-10#:~:text=Ruth%20Morgan,%20Mary%20Lovelace%20O%E2%80%99Neal,%20Faith%20Ringgold,%20Carrie.

“Street Story Quilt”. MET Museum. Accessed 1st October, 2024. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/485416#:~:text=Ringgold%20was%20a%20pioneering%20artist%20and%20activist%20whose.

“Woman on a Bridge #1 of 5: Tar Beach”. Guggenheim. Accessed 1st October, 2024. https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3719.