Faith Ringgold (1930-2024)

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 Ringgold Dies at 93; Wove Black Life Into Quilts and Children’s Books A champion of Black artists, she explored themes of race, gender, class, family and community through a vast array of media and later the written word. Faith Ringgold at her home in Englewood, N.J., in 2020. She was best known for what she called “story quilts”: large panels of unstretched canvas, painted with narrative scenes in vivid acrylics.Credit…Meron Tekie Menghistab for The New York Times April 13, 2024 By MArgalit Fox, The New York Times Faith Ringgold, a multimedia artist whose pictorial quilts depicting the African American experience gave rise to a second distinguished career as a writer and illustrator of children’s books, died on Saturday at her home in Englewood, N.J. She was 93. Her death was confirmed by her daughter Barbara Wallace. For more than a half-century, Ms. Ringgold explored themes of race, gender, class, family and community through a vast array of media, among them painting, sculpture, mask- and doll-making, textiles and performance art. She was also a longtime advocate of bringing the work of Black people and women into the collections of major American museums. Ms. Ringgold’s art, which was often rooted in her own experience, has been exhibited at the White House and in museums and galleries around the world. It is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the American Craft Museum in New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and other institutions. For Ms. Ringgold, as her work and many interviews made plain, art and activism were a seamless, if sometimes quilted, whole. Classically trained as a painter and sculptor, she began producing political paintings in the 1960s and ’70s that explored the highly charged subjects of relations between Black and white people, and between men and women, in America. “Few artists have kept as many balls in the air as long as Faith Ringgold,” the New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote in 2013, reviewing an exhibition of her work at ACA Galleries in Manhattan. “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 hallmarks of Ms. Ringgold’s style included the integration of craft materials like fabric, beads and thread with fine-art materials like paint and canvas; vibrant, saturated colors; a flattened perspective that deliberately evoked the work of naïve painters; and a keen, often tender focus on ordinary Black people and the visual minutiae of their daily lives. Critics praised Ms. Ringgold’s work from the beginning. But wide renown, in the form of exposure in the country’s most prestigious museums, largely eluded her until midlife — a consequence, she often said, of her race, her sex and her uncompromising focus on art as a vehicle for social justice. “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,” she told The Orlando Sentinel in 1992. “Of course, I didn’t realize at the time that you could do it and not have anyone know you were doing it.” In a 2022 retrospective at the New Museum in Manhattan: from left, “The Bitter Nest, Part II: The Harlem Renaissance Party,” 1988; “The Bitter Nest, Part III: Lovers in Paris,” 1988; and “The Bitter Nest, Part IV: The Letter,” 1988.Credit…Simbarashe Cha for The New York Times Ms. Ringgold ultimately became best known for what she called “story quilts”: large panels of unstretched canvas, painted with narrative scenes in vivid acrylics, framed by quasi-traditional borders of pieced fabric and often incorporating written text. Meant for the wall rather than the bed, the quilts tell of the joys and rigors of Black lives — and of Black women’s lives in particular — while simultaneously celebrating the human capacity to transcend circumstance through the art of dreaming. One of her most celebrated story quilts, “Tar Beach,” completed in 1988, gave rise to her first children’s book, published three years later under the same title. With text and original paintings by Ms. Ringgold, the book, like the quilt, depicts a Black family convivially picnicking and slumbering on the roof of their Harlem apartment building on a sultry summer’s night. The cover of Ms. Ringgold’s first book, “Tar Beach,” inspired by one of her most celebrated quilts. “Tar Beach” was named a Caldecott Honor Book by the American Library Association and one of the year’s best illustrated children’s titles by The New York Times Book Review. It has endured as a childhood staple and garnered a string of other honors, including the Coretta Scott King Award, presented by the library association for distinguished children’s books about African American life. Ms. Ringgold went on to illustrate more than a dozen picture books, most with her own text, including “Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky” (1992), about Harriet Tubman, and “If a Bus Could Talk: The Story of Rosa Parks” (1999). Her eminence in the field is all the more striking in that she never set out to be a children’s author in the first place. A Child of Harlem The youngest child of Andrew Louis Jones and Willi (Posey) Jones, Faith Willi Jones was born in Harlem on Oct. 8, 1930. Her father, a New York City sanitation truck driver, left the family when Faith was about 2, though he remained in close contact. Faith’s mother, a seamstress, later became a fashion designer with her own label, Mme. Willi Posey, and an atelier in Harlem. She was so successful that she was able to move with her children to Sugar Hill, the exclusive Harlem enclave whose residents also included Duke Ellington, Dinah Washington and Thurgood Marshall. “We all lived together, so it wasn’t a surprise to see these people rolling up in their limos,” Ms. Ringgold told The Times in 2010. “And that said to us, you can do this, too.” An asthmatic child, Faith was often kept home in bed, where she passed the time drawing and painting. Her father brought her her first easel, salvaged from his trash-collection rounds. Theirs was a storytelling family, and as an adult, Ms. Ringgold recalled with particular pleasure the narrative gifts of her elder brother, Andrew. “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,” she said in an interview for the NPR program “All Things Considered” in 1999. “So my brother would come home and he would rewrite everything.” One day in the 1940s, when Andrew was a teenager, he was dispatched on an errand for their mother to a white neighborhood in Upper Manhattan. There, a gang of white youths surrounded him and beat him nearly to death. He was refused treatment at a local hospital. He recovered, but he was never the same, Ms. Ringgold said. He became addicted to drugs and died of an overdose in 1961. A series of Ringgold quilts in what she called “The French Collection,” on view in 2022 at the New Museum. Credit…Faith Ringgold/ARS, NY; Simbarashe Cha for The New York Times The young Ms. Ringgold graduated from George Washington High School in Upper Manhattan. At about 20, she eloped with a childhood sweetheart, Robert Earl Wallace, and had two daughters in quick succession. But she soon discovered that her husband, a classical and jazz pianist, was a drug addict; they separated in 1954 and divorced two years later. (Mr. Wallace also died of an overdose, of heroin, in 1961.) Ms. Ringgold earned a bachelor’s degree in art and education from the City College of New York in 1955 and a master’s in art there in 1959. In 1962, she married Burdette Ringgold. From 1955 to 1973, Ms. Ringgold taught art in the New York City public school system, in Harlem and the Bronx, while trying to establish a career as a painter. At first she produced landscape paintings in the vein of the European masters she had studied in college. “We copied Greek busts, we copied Degas, we copied everything,” she said in an interview for the catalog of “Faith Ringgold: A 25-Year Survey,” a 1990 retrospective at the Fine Arts Museum of Long Island that toured nationally. “It was generally thought that we weren’t experienced enough to be original, and if we were original we were sometimes up for ridicule.” Little by little, Ms. Ringgold cast about for an aesthetic that reflected her own life and times. By the 1960s, influenced by the writings of James Baldwin and LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), along with the rich visual polyphony of African art and the rhythms of the jazz she had heard and loved as a child, she had found it. Her work from this period includes the “Black Light” series, a set of portraits in which she depicted her African American subjects using a specially conceived palette of rich dark colors. It also includes a 1967 painting, “American People Series #20: Die,” which proved a professional watershed. Twelve feet long, the canvas depicts a violent profusion of men, women and children — Black and white, some wielding weapons, most spattered with blood — whose roiling tangle recalls Picasso’s 1937 masterpiece, “Guernica.” “Die” became the centerpiece of her first solo exhibition, held that year at Spectrum Gallery in New York. The show helped her stake her claim as a significant American artist. Ms. Ringgold’s “American People Series #20: Die,” from 1967, attracted a crowd at the Museum of Modern Art in June 2019, just before the museum closed for renovations. Credit…Jeenah Moon for The New York Times When a redesigned Museum of Modern Art reopened later in 2019, it juxtaposed Ms. Ringgold’s “Die” with Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” from 1907.Credit…Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Faith Ringgold/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via ACA Galleries, New York; Jeenah Moon for The New York Times A Voice of Protest In 1968, Ms. Ringgold helped organize a protest by Black artists, long marginalized by the art establishment, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Two years later, she took part in a protest at the Museum of Modern Art centering on women artists. “Today, some 25 years later,” she wrote in 1995, “nothing much has changed at the Modern except which white man gets the next show.” The word “man” was telling, for Ms. Ringgold had long since come to believe that her efforts on behalf of Black artists were of little avail to those who also happened to be female. By the 1970s, she was producing more overtly feminist work. Ms. Ringgold, who had learned to sew from her mother, began augmenting her arsenal with the traditional materials of “women’s work”: needles, thread and cloth. She made masks, cloth dolls and soft fabric sculptures, some of them life-size, that were exhibited on their own and used in her performance pieces about racial and sexual disenfranchisement. She also embarked on her “Slave Rape” series, a set of paintings depicting the fate of Black women in the antebellum South, which she framed with borders of patterned cloth. Collaborating with her mother, Ms. Ringgold made her first full quilt, “Echoes of Harlem,” a montage of painted Black faces and pieced fabric, in 1980. It was a modern manifestation of a centuries-old Black tradition. “I think of quilts as the classic art form of Black people in America,” Ms. Ringgold told The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa., in 2005. “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.” In 1983, frustrated at her inability to find a publisher for a memoir she had written, Ms. Ringgold began incorporating narrative text into her quilts. Few artists of the period were doing anything of the kind. The first of her story quilts, “Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?,” reimagined the original stereotyped figure — the fat, frumpy Black woman, drawn straight from a minstrel show, whom many Black people considered offensive. On Ms. Ringgold’s quilt, Jemima has been transformed into a Black feminist role model: trim, elegant and a successful entrepreneur. In the late 1980s, after an editor at Crown Publishers saw “Tar Beach,” Ms. Ringgold was asked to transform that quilt into a picture book. The resulting work tells the story of 8-year-old Cassie Lightfoot — the daughter of the picnicking family — who one magical night in 1939 flies over the rooftops of the city to soar above the George Washington Bridge. “I can fly — yes, fly,” Ms. Ringgold’s text reads. “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.” Ms. Ringgold’s art was acquired by many private collectors, among them Maya Angelou and Oprah Winfrey. It was also commissioned for public spaces, including the 125th Street subway station on the Lenox Avenue line in Manhattan, where two immense mosaic murals, collectively titled “Flying Home,” depict storied Black figures like Josephine Baker, Malcolm X and Zora Neale Hurston. Ms. Ringgold in 1999 at her New York City studio.Credit…Anthony Barboza/Getty Images For what is very likely the most widely utilized public space of all, the internet, she created a Google Doodle to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2012. Ms. Ringgold was the subject of significant retrospectives at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Rutgers University and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in Washington. In 2016, not long after her 85th birthday, MoMA acquired “Die” for its permanent collection. More recently, in 2022, she received a major retrospective at the New Museum in Manhattan. The show, which filled three floors, “makes clear that what consigned Ringgold to an outlier track half a century ago puts her front and center now,” Holland Cotter wrote in his review in The Times. The exhibition later traveled to the Musée Picasso in Paris. Ms. Ringgold, who for many years divided her time between her home in Englewood, N.J., and California, where she was a faculty member of the University of California, San Diego, also taught in New York at the Bank Street College of Education, Pratt Institute and elsewhere. In 1999, she established the Anyone Can Fly Foundation, which promotes the work of artists of the African diaspora from the 18th century onward. Among her many laurels are a Guggenheim fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts awards for painting and sculpture, and a spate of honorary doctorates. Her other books include her memoir, “We Flew Over the Bridge,” published by Little, Brown & Company in 1995. In addition to her daughter Barbara, a linguist, Ms. Ringgold is survived by another daughter, Michele Wallace, a prominent feminist writer and cultural critic; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Her husband, Burdette Ringgold, died in 2020. Though Ms. Ringgold had felt the need to draw and paint from the time she was a girl, she said late in life that her career sprang from an even more urgent imperative. As she told an interviewer in 2008, “If I woke up white in America, I wouldn’t be an artist.”