FAITH RINGGOLD (b. 1930, USA)

Faith Ringgold, born 1930 in Harlem, New York, is painter, writer, children’s author, mixed media sculptor, and performance artist, best known for her narrative quilts. She received her B.S. and M.A. degrees in visual art from the City College of New York in 1955 and 1959. Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of California in San Diego, Ringgold has received 23 Honorary Doctorates. Faith Ringgold is the mother of two daughters, Michele and Barbara Wallace.

A fervent civil rights and gender equity activist, Ringgold’s work is inherently political. Ringgold’s oil paintings and posters begun in the mid-to-late 1960s carried strong political messages in support of the civil-rights movement. In the early 1970s, she abandoned traditional oils for painting in acrylic on unstretched canvas with fabric borders. The painted narrative quilts for which Ringgold is best known grew out of these early paintings. Ringgold also personally demonstrated against the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney over their exclusion of black and female artists. She protested outside New York museums demanding equal gender and racial representation in exhibitions, designed political posters and co-organised the People’s Flag Show, for which she was arrested in 1970 (lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union provided counsel and all of the charges were subsequently dropped).

Ringgold’s first solo gallery shows were held in 1967 and 1970 at the cooperative Spectrum Gallery, New York. Retrospectives of her work have been organized by Rutgers University, New Brunswick (1973), the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (1984), and the Fine Arts Museum of Long Island, Hempstead (1990). Ringgold’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions devoted to political art, women’s art, contemporary quilts, and African-American art, as well as in the Whitney Biennial (1985). Her achievements as an artist, teacher, and activist have been recognized with numerous honors, including National Endowment for the Arts awards in sculpture (1978) and painting (1989), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1987. Ringgold’s work is included in a number of museum collections, including MoMA, The Guggenheim, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.