Faith Ringgold


Faith Ringgold is a painter, writer, mixed media sculptor and performance artist, best known for her narrative quilts.

Early life

Faith Ringgold 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, descended from working-class families displaced by the Great Migration. Ringgold's mother, a fashion designer, and her father, an avid storyteller, raised their daughter in an environment that encouraged her creativity. After the Harlem Renaissance, Ringgold's childhood home in Harlem was left with a vibrant and thriving arts scene. Figures such as Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes lived just around the corner from her home. Her childhood friend, Sonny Rollins, who would later become a prominent jazz musician, often visited her family and practiced his 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. In a statement she later made about her youth, she said, "I grew up in Harlem during the Great Depression. This did not mean I was poor and oppressed. We were 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 1950, 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 because City College only allowed women to be enrolled in certain majors. The same year, she also married a jazz pianist named Robert Earl Wallace and had two children. However, because of his heroin addiction, they separated four years later. In the meantime, she studied with artists Robert Gwathmey, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and was 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 travelling 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. This trip was abruptly cut short, however, due to the untimely death of her brother in 1961. Faith Ringgold, her mother, and her daughters all returned to the US for his funeral. She married Burdette Ringgold on May 19, 1962.
Ringgold also traveled to West Africa in 1976 and 1977. These two trips would later have a profound influence on her mask making, doll painting and sculptures.

Artwork

Ringgold's artistic practice is extremely broad and diverse, and includes media from painting to quilts, from sculptures and performance art to children's books. As an educator, she taught in the New York City Public school system and at the college level. In 1973, she quit teaching public school to devote herself to creating art full-time.

Painting

Ringgold began her painting career in the 1950s after receiving her degree. She took inspiration from the writings of James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka, African art, Impressionism, and Cubism to create the works she made in the 1960s. Her early work is composed with flat figures and shapes. Though she received a great deal of attention with these images, galleries and collectors were uncomfortable with them and she sold very little work. This is because many of her early paintings focused on the underlying racism in everyday activities. These works were also politically based and reflected her experiences growing up during the Harlem Renaissance. These themes grew into maturity 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. It portrays the American lifestyle in relation to the Civil Rights Movement and illustrates these racial interactions from a woman's point of view. This collection asks the question "why?" about some basic racial issues in American society. In a 2019 article with Hyperallergic magazine, Ringgold remarked that "... 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." 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 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. 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.
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." Because of this, she was "in pursuit of a more affirmative black aesthetic". She also created larger than life murals such as The Flag Is Bleeding, U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Advent of Black Power People, and Die, concluding her American People series. These murals helped her approach her future artwork in a new way.
In the French Collection, Ringgold explored a different solution to overcome the rough historical legacy of women and men of African descent. Ringgold made this multi-paneled series that touches on the truths and mythologies of modernism. As France was the home of modern art at the time, it also became the source for African-American artists to find their own "modern" identity.

Quilts

Ringgold stated she switched from painting to fabric to get away from the association of painting with Western/European traditions.
Ringgold went to Europe in the summer of 1972 with her daughter Michele. While Michele went to visit her friends in Spain, Ringgold continued onto Germany and the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, she visited the Rijksmuseum, which became one of the most influential experiences affecting her mature work, and subsequently, lead to the development of her quilt paintings. In the museum, Ringgold encountered a collection of 14th- and 15th-century Nepali paintings that were framed with cloth brocades. These thangkas inspired her to produce fabric borders around her own work, so when she returned to the US, a new painting series was born: The Slave Rape Series. In these works, Ringgold imagined what it would have been like to be an African woman captured and sold into slavery. She invited her mother, Willi Posey, to collaborate on this project since Posey was a popular Harlem clothing designer and seamstress during the 1950s who had taught Ringgold how to quilt in the African-American tradition. This collaboration eventually led to the making of their first quilt, Echoes of Harlem, in 1980.
She quilted her stories to be heard, since at the time no one would publish the autobiography she had been working on. In an interview with the Crocker Art Museum she stated, "In 1983, I began writing stories on my quilts as an alternative. That way, when my quilts were hung up to look at, or photographed for a book, people could still read my stories." Her first quilt story Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima? depicts the story of Aunt Jemima as a matriarch restaurateur and fictionally revises "the most maligned black female stereotype." Another piece, titled Change: Faith Ringgold’s Over 100 Pounds Weight Loss Performance Story Quilt, engages the topic of "a woman who wants to feel good about herself, struggling to cultural norms of beauty, a person whose intelligence and political sensitivity allows her to see the inherent contradictions in her position, and someone who gets inspired to take the whole dilemma into an artwork".
The series of story quilts from Ringgold's French Collection deals with historical African-American women who dedicated themselves to change the world, the redirection of the male gaze, and the immersion of historical fantasy and childlike imaginative storytelling. Many of her quilts went on to inspire the children books that she later made, such as Dinner at Aunt Connie's House published by Hyperion Books, based on The Dinner Quilt.

Sculpture

In 1973, Ringgold began experimenting with sculpture as a new medium to document her local community and national events. Her sculptures range from costumed masks to hanging and freestanding soft sculptures, representing both real and fictional characters from her past and present. She began making mixed-media costumed masks after hearing her students express their surprise that she did not already include masks in her artistic practice. The masks were pieces of linen canvas that were painted, beaded and woven with raffia for hair, and rectangular pieces of cloth for dresses with painted gourds to represent breasts. She eventually made a series of 11 mask costumes, called the Witch Mask Series, in collaboration with her mother. These costumes could also be worn, but would give the wearer feminine features like breasts, bellies and hips. In her memoir We Flew Over the Bridge, Ringgold also notes that in traditional African rituals, the masks would have feminine features though the wearers were almost always men. In this series she wanted the masks to have both a "spiritual and sculptural identity", emphasizing the fact that the masks could be worn and were not merely objects to be hung and displayed.
After the Witch Mask Series, she moved onto another series of 31 masks, the Family of Woman Mask Series in 1973, which commemorated women and children whom she had known as a child. She later began making dolls with painted gourd heads and costumes. The first of this series was her piece, Wilt, a 7'3" portrait sculpture of basketball player Wilt Chamberlain. She began with Wilt as a response to some negative comments that Chamberlain made on African-American women in his autobiography. Wilt features three figures, the basketball player with a white wife and a mixed daughter, both fictional characters. The sculptures had baked and painted coconuts shell heads, and anatomically-correct foam and rubber bodies covered in clothing. They also hung from the ceiling on invisible fishing lines. Her soft sculptures later evolved even further into life sized "portrait masks", representing characters from her life and society, from unknown Harlem denizens to Martin Luther King Jr. She carved foam faces into likenesses that were then spray-painted—however, in her memoir she describes how the faces later began to deteriorate and had to be restored. She did this by covering the faces in cloth, molding them carefully to preserve the likeness.

Performance art

As many of Ringgold's mask sculptures could also be worn as costumes, her transition from mask-making to performance art was a self-described "natural progression". Though art performance pieces were abundant in the 1960s and '70s, Ringgold was instead inspired by the African tradition of combining storytelling, dance, music, costumes and masks into one production. Her first piece involving these masks was The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro. She described it as a narrative of the dynamics of racism and the oppression of drug addiction, in response to the American Bicentennial celebrations of 1976. She wished to voice the opinion of many other African Americans that there was "no reason to celebrate two hundred years of American Independence…for almost half of that time we had been in slavery". The piece was performed in mime with music and lasted thirty minutes, and incorporated many of her past paintings, sculptures and installations. She later moved on to produce many other performance pieces including a solo autobiographical performance piece called Being My Own Woman: An Autobiographical Masked Performance Piece, a masked story performance set during the Harlem Renaissance called The Bitter Nest, and a piece to celebrate her weight loss called Change: Faith Ringgold’s Over 100 Pound Weight Loss Performance Story Quilt. Each of these pieces were multidisciplinary, involving masks, costumes, quilts, paintings, storytelling, song and dance. Many of these performances were also interactive, as Ringgold encouraged her audience to sing and dance with her. She describes in her autobiography, We Flew Over the Bridge, that her performance pieces were not meant to shock, confuse or anger, but rather "simply another way to tell my story".

Publications

Ringgold has written and illustrated 17 children's books. Her first was Tar Beach, published by Crown in 1991, based on her quilt story of the same name. For that work she won the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award and the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration. She was also the runner-up for the Caldecott Medal, the premier American Library Association award for picture book illustration. In her picture books, Ringgold approaches complex issues of racism in straightforward and hopeful ways, combining fantasy and realism to create an uplifting message for children.

Activism

Ringgold has been an activist since the 1970s, participating in several feminist and anti-racist organizations. In 1968, fellow artist Poppy Johnson, and art critic Lucy Lippard, founded the Ad Hoc Women's Art Committee with Ringgold and protested a major modernist art exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Members of the committee demanded that women artists account for fifty percent of the exhibitors and created disturbances at the museum by singing, blowing whistles, chanting about their exclusion, and leaving raw eggs and sanitary napkins on the ground. Not only were women artists excluded from this show, but no African-American artists were represented either. Even Jacob Lawrence, an artist in the museum's permanent collection, was excluded. After participating in more protest activity, Ringgold was arrested on November 13, 1970.
Ringgold and Lippard also worked together during their participation in the group Women Artists in Revolution. That same year, Ringgold and her daughter Michele Wallace founded Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation. Around 1974, Ringgold and Wallace were founding members of the National Black Feminist Organization. Ringgold was also a founding member of the "Where We At" Black Women Artists, a New York-based women's art collective associated with the Black Arts Movement. The inaugural show of "Where We At" featured soul food rather than traditional cocktails, exhibiting an embrace of cultural roots. The show was first presented in 1971 with eight artists and had expanded to 20 by 1976.
In a statement about black representation in the arts, she said:

"When I was in elementary school I used to see reproductions of Horace Pippin’s 1942 painting called John Brown Going to His Hanging in my textbooks. I didn't know Pippin was a black person. No one ever told me that. I was much, much older before I found out that there was at least one black artist in my history books. Only one. Now that didn't help me. That wasn't good enough for me. How come I didn't have that source of power? It is important. That's why I am a black artist. It is exactly why I say who I am."

In 1988, Ringgold co-founded the Coast-to-Coast National Women Artists of Color Projects with Clarissa Sligh. From 1988 to 1996, this organization exhibited the works of African American women across the United States. In 1990, Sligh was one of three organizers of the exhibit Coast to Coast: A Women of Color National Artists’ Book Project held January 14 – February 2, 1990, at the Flossie Martin Gallery, and later at the Eubie Blake Center and the Artemesia Gallery. Ringgold wrote the catalog introduction titled "History of Coast to Coast". More than 100 women artists of color were included. The catalog included brief artist statements and photos of the artists' books, including works by Sligh, Ringgold, Emma Amos, Beverly Buchanan, Elizabeth Catlett, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Howardena Pindell, Adrian Piper, Joyce Scott, and Deborah Willis.

Later life

In 1987, Ringgold accepted a teaching position in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego. She continued to teach until 2002, when she retired.
In 1995, Ringgold published her first autobiography titled We Flew Over the Bridge. The book is a memoir detailing her journey as an artist and life events, from her childhood in Harlem and Sugar Hill, to her marriages and children, to her professional career and accomplishments as an artist. Two years later she received two honorary doctorates, one for Education from Wheelock College in Boston, and the second for Philosophy from Molloy College in New York.
She has now received over 80 awards and honors and 23 Honorary Doctorates
She was interviewed for the film !Women Art Revolution.
Ringgold resides with her second husband Burdette "Birdie" Ringgold in a home in Englewood, New Jersey, where she has lived and maintained a steady studio practice since 1992.

Copyright suit against BET

Ringgold was the plaintiff in a significant copyright case, Ringgold v. Black Entertainment Television. Black Entertainment Television had aired several episodes of the television series Roc in which a Ringgold poster was shown on nine different occasions for a total of 26.75 seconds. Ringgold sued for copyright infringement. The court found BET liable, rejecting the de minimis defense raised by BET, which had argued that the use of Ringgold's copyrighted work was so minimal that it did not constitute an infringement.

In popular culture

Her first one-woman show, American People opened December 19, 1967 at Spectrum Gallery. The show included three of her murals: The Flag is Bleeding, U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Advent of Black Power, and . She wanted the opening to not be "another all white" opening but a "refined black art affair." There was music and her children invited their classmates. Over 500 people attended the opening including artists Romaire Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Richard Mayhew.
In 2019 a major retrospective of Ringgold's work was mounted by London's Serpentine Galleries, to run from June 6 until September 8.

Works and publications

Notable works in public collections