Faith Ringgold Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life
Faith Ringgold was born in Harlem, New York City, on October 8, 1930, and grew up during the waning years of the Harlem Renaissance. Her parents, Andrew Jones and the seamstress and fashion designer Willi Posey Jones, nurtured her creativity from an early age. Chronic asthma kept her at home for stretches of her childhood, where drawing and sewing became daily practices. From her mother, known professionally as Willi Posey, she learned the value of craft, color, and fabric, lessons that later became central to her art. Harlem itself provided a vibrant backdrop: jazz, parades, storefront churches, and neighborhood artisans showed her that art could be woven into everyday life.

Education and Early Teaching
Ringgold studied at the City College of New York, where, like many women of her generation, she entered through the School of Education and also pursued studio art. She earned a B.S. in 1955 and an M.A. in 1959, grounding herself in both pedagogy and painting. She went on to teach in New York City public schools, building a career as an educator while painting at night. Teaching honed her clarity and discipline; the classroom also kept her close to the stories and struggles of working families that would animate her work.

Emergence as a Painter
In the early 1960s Ringgold developed the American People Series (1963 to 1967), a group of paintings that addressed race, class, and gender amid the Civil Rights era. Stark compositions like The Flag Is Bleeding and American People Series #20: Die captured social tension and the everyday violence of the period. Influences ranged from the narrative clarity of Jacob Lawrence and the community-minded example of Romare Bearden to Ringgold's own encounters with European modernism; Picasso's Guernica in particular provided a model for art as urgent testimony. Her subsequent Black Light series reduced or eliminated white pigment to explore color, skin, and perception from a Black perspective.

Activism and Public Interventions
Committed to changing the institutions around her, Ringgold joined protests against exclusion in major museums. She worked with the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists, alongside figures such as Lucy Lippard and Poppy Johnson, to challenge discriminatory practices. With the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, co-founded by Benny Andrews and others, she participated in actions targeting tokenism and absence of Black artists. In 1970 she co-organized The People's Flag Show at Judson Memorial Church with Jon Hendricks and Jean Toche, an event that led to their arrests under flag desecration laws and made national headlines. Around this time she also produced the United States of Attica poster in response to the 1971 prison uprising, fusing graphic design and activism. Her mural For the Women's House (1971), made for the women's facility on Rikers Island, underscored her belief that art should circulate beyond galleries; the work was later relocated to the Brooklyn Museum.

Family, Collaboration, and Community
Ringgold's art life was deeply entwined with her family. Her mother, Willi Posey, collaborated with her through the 1980s, sewing and designing the fabric components that framed many of Ringgold's paintings and quilts. Ringgold married Robert Wallace when she was young; they had two daughters, Michele Wallace and Barbara Wallace. Michele Wallace became a prominent writer and cultural critic, and later collaborated with her mother on texts that accompany artworks and on performance projects. After her divorce, Ringgold married Burdette Ringgold, whose name she took and under which she became widely known. In the early 1970s she worked with fellow artists Dindga McCannon and Kay Brown to develop exhibitions and networks for Black women artists, helping build the collective energy that sustained their practices.

Performance, Soft Sculpture, and Tankas
During the 1970s Ringgold widened her practice. She made soft sculptures and masks that drew on African aesthetics and the pageantry of parade and protest. She also developed what she called tankas, paintings bordered with richly patterned fabric, inspired in part by Tibetan thangkas and by the dressmaking expertise of her mother. Performance became another arena: works such as The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro, created with participation from her family and community, blended theater, music, costume, and political critique.

Story Quilts and Literary Turn
In the 1980s Ringgold began the story quilts that became her signature. With Willi Posey's sewing and design guidance, she joined narrative panels of paint and cloth to words written directly on fabric. Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima? (1983) retold and reclaimed a racist stereotype by inventing a matriarch and entrepreneurial family, offering a counter-history of Black success. The Women on a Bridge series culminated in Tar Beach (1988), which depicts a Harlem rooftop as an imaginative runway, a space where a child can fly over the city and claim it as her own. Tar Beach became a celebrated picture book in 1991, bringing Ringgold's imagery and voice to a vast new audience and receiving major honors. In the 1990s The French Collection followed a fictional young Black woman artist in Paris through encounters with histories of art and empire; quilts such as Dancing at the Louvre staged witty, critical conversations with Picasso and Matisse while centering Black female presence.

Writing and Teaching
Alongside the quilts, Ringgold authored and illustrated numerous children's books, including Aunt Harriet's Underground Railroad in the Sky and others that introduced young readers to history through imaginative narrative. Her memoir, We Flew Over the Bridge, offered a frank account of art, family, racism, and persistence. In higher education she served on the faculty of the University of California, San Diego, where she taught and mentored a generation of artists while maintaining an active studio practice. Through these roles she affirmed that making, writing, and teaching could be mutually sustaining.

Recognition and Major Collections
Over the decades Ringgold's work entered major museums, and seminal pieces gained wide visibility. American People Series #20: Die has been prominently displayed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, signaling a broader reassessment of her 1960s paintings. The Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and many institutions across the United States and abroad have exhibited and collected her art. Large-scale surveys and retrospectives, including international presentations, positioned her as a central figure linking civil rights, era protest art, feminist practice, textile traditions, and contemporary narrative strategies.

Approach and Themes
Ringgold's hallmark is the fusion of mediums: painting, sewing, writing, and performance work together to tell stories about home, migration, labor, beauty, and struggle. She places family at the heart of history, often naming characters and stitching genealogies into borders. Her work challenges hierarchies that once separated fine art from craft and that marginalized women's work, especially quilting. At the same time, her portraits of crowds, couples, and solitary figures insist on psychological complexity and on the capacity of everyday people to imagine freedom.

Later Years and Legacy
Ringgold lived for many years in Englewood, New Jersey, sustaining close ties with her daughters, Michele Wallace and Barbara Wallace, and with the communities that nurtured her art. Late-career exhibitions brought renewed attention to the American People paintings alongside the quilts, allowing audiences to see the continuity of her vision across six decades. She continued to advocate for equity in the arts, invoking the collaborative spirit of mentors and allies such as Willi Posey, and of peers in activist circles including Lucy Lippard, Benny Andrews, Dindga McCannon, and Kay Brown. Faith Ringgold died in 2024 at the age of 93. She left behind a body of work that transformed the possibilities of narrative in contemporary art and affirmed the power of images and words, cloth and paint, to bear witness and to dream.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by Faith, under the main topics: Art - Work - Perseverance - Nostalgia.