Faith Ringgold (born Faith Willi Jones; October 8, 1930 – April 13, 2024) was an American painter, author, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, and intersectional activist, perhaps best known for her narrative quilts.
Ringgold was born in Harlem, New York City, and earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from the City College of New York. She was an art teacher in the New York City public school system. As a multimedia artist, her works explored themes of family, race, class, and gender. Her series of story quilts, designed from the 1980s on, captured the experiences of Black Americans and became her signature art form. During her career, she promoted the work of Black artists and rallied against their marginalization by the art museums. She wrote and illustrated over a dozen children's books. Ringgold's art has been exhibited throughout the world and is in the permanent collections of The Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Faith Willi Jones 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 was a fashion designer and her father, as well as working a range of jobs, was an avid storyteller. They raised her 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 became 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 maintained that despite her upbringing in Great Depression–era Harlem, 'this did not mean [she] was poor and oppressed'—she was 'protected from oppression and surrounded by a loving family.' With all of these influences combined, Ringgold's future artwork was greatly affected by the people, poetry, and music she experienced in her childhood, as well as the racism, sexism, and segregation she dealt with in her everyday life.
In 1948, 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. In 1950, she married a jazz pianist named Robert Earl Wallace and had two children, Michele and Barbara Faith Wallace, in 1952. 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 traveling 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 (1991–1997). This trip was abruptly cut short, however, due to the untimely death of her brother in 1961. Ringgold, her mother, and her daughters all returned to the United States for his funeral. She married Burdette Ringgold on May 19, 1962.
Ringgold visited West Africa twice: once in 1976 and again in 1977. These travels deeply influenced her mask making, doll painting, and sculptures.
Ringgold's artistic practice was extremely varied—from painting to quilts, from sculptures and performance art to children's books. As an educator, she taught in both the New York City Public school system and at college level. In 1973, she quit teaching public school to devote herself to creating art full-time. In 1995, she was approached by ACA Galleries for exclusive representation and was represented by them for the rest of her life.
Ringgold began her painting career in the 1950s after receiving her degree. Her early work is composed with flat figures and shapes. She was inspired by the writings of James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka, African art, Impressionism, and Cubism to create the works she made in the 1960s. Though she received a great deal of attention with these images, many of her early paintings focused on the underlying racism in everyday activities; which made sales difficult, and disquieted galleries and collectors. These works were also politically based and reflected her experiences growing up during the Harlem Renaissance—themes which matured during the Civil Rights Movement and Women's movement.
Taking inspiration from artist Jacob Lawrence and writer James Baldwin, Ringgold painted her first political collection named the American People Series in 1963, which portrays the American lifestyle in relation to the Civil Rights Movement. American People Series illustrates these racial interactions from a female point of view, and calls basic racial issues in the United States of America into question. In a 2019 article with Hyperallergic magazine, Ringgold explained that her choice for a political collection comes from the turbulent atmosphere around her: "( ... ) it was the 1960s and I could not act like everything was okay. I couldn't paint landscapes in the 1960s—there was too much going on. This is what inspired the American People Series." This revelation stemmed from her work being rejected by Ruth White, a gallery owner in New York. Oil paintings like For Members Only, Neighbors, Watching and Waiting, and The Civil Rights Triangle also embody these themes.
In 1972, as part of a commission sponsored by the Creative Artists Public Service Program, Ringgold installed For the Women's House in the Women's Facility on Rikers Island. The large-scale mural is an anti-carceral work, composed of depictions of women in professional and civil servant roles, representing positive alternatives to incarceration. The women portrayed are inspired by extensive interviews Ringgold conducted with women inmates, and the design divides the portraits into triangular sections—referencing Kuba textiles of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It was her first public commission and widely regarded as her first feminist work. Subsequently, the work inspired the creation of Art Without Walls, an organization that brings art to prisons.
Around the opening of her show for American People, Ringgold also worked on her collection called America Black (also called the Black Light Series), in which she experimented with darker colors. This was spurred by her observation that "white western art was focused around the color white and light/contrast/chiaroscuro, while African cultures, in general used darker colors and emphasized color rather than tonality to create contrast." This led her to pursue "a more affirmative Black aesthetic". Her American People series concluded with larger-scale murals, such as The Flag is Bleeding, U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Advent of Black Power People, and Die. These murals lent her a fresher and stronger prospective to her future artwork.
Her piece, Black Light Series #10: Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger, 1969—which was created in response to the first image of the Apollo 11 Moon landing—was to be purchased by the Chase Manhattan Bank, after Ringgold's work caught the attention of David Rockefeller, the chief executive of the bank. He sent a couple of representatives to buy a piece, and they realized, only after the artist suggested they actually read the text on her work, that the stars and stripes of the American flag as depicted also optically incorporated the phrase "DIE NIGGER". The representatives instead purchased Black Light #9: American Spectrum. In 2013, Black Light Series #10: Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger was shown in the artist's solo exhibition at ACA Galleries in New York, where it was highlighted by the artist and critic Paige K. Bradley in the first solo show coverage Ringgold had ever received from Artforum up until then, preceding Beau Rutland's own review two months later. The piece Black Light #1: Big Black, from 1967, is included in the permanent collection of Pérez Art Museum Miami.