Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold, For Whites Only, from Letter from Birmingham City Jail, 2007

2007

Prolific American artist Faith Ringgold long championed civil rights and women’s rights through her work, which spans media from oils to textiles. Over the course of her career, she received numerous accolades, including two National Endowment for the Arts awards, one each in sculpture and painting, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1987) and more than 20 honorary doctorate degrees.

Born Faith Willi Jones in Harlem, New York, Ringgold grew up surrounded by creativity. She was raised by a fashion-designer mother and a minister father who was a talented storyteller during the peak of the Harlem Renaissance. She earned both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in visual art from the City College of New York, in 1955 and 1959, respectively.

In the 1960s, Ringgold’s paintings took a decidedly political bent, supporting the civil rights movement; she protested the lack of work by Black and female artists in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York City. She also cofounded Where We At, a collective of Black female artists. By the 1970s, Ringgold had moved away from painting and on to textiles, sculpture and performance art.

Ringgold created masks of painted canvas inspired by wooden masks made by the Dan peoples of Liberia — also to promote the work of women in art — as well as acrylic works that combined the style of Tibetan thangkas, or silk paintings, with African quilting techniques. This led to her collaborating with her mother in the 1980s for the development of her iconic story quilts, for which Ringgold is perhaps best known.

Ringgold's work can be found in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, all in New York, as well as the Baltimore Museum of Art and many more.

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