Faith Ringgold enrolled in the City College of New York to study art in 1950 wherein she completed her Bachelor of Sciences in 1955 and Master of Arts in 1959.
Faith Ringgold enrolled in the City College of New York to study art in 1950 wherein she completed her Bachelor of Sciences in 1955 and Master of Arts in 1959.
Faith Ringgold is an American painter, writer, mixed media sculptor and performance artist, best known for her narrative quilts.
Background
Ethnicity:
Ringgold's parents descended from working-class families displaced by the Great Migration.
Faith Ringgold was born on October 8, 1930, in Harlem Hospital, New York City, New York, United States, to Andrew Louis Jones and Willie Posey Jones. She was the youngest of three children.
As her mother was a fashion designer and father an avid storyteller, Ringgold was raised 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.
Education
Faith could not be regular at primary school due to health issues. Because of her chronic asthma, Ringgold spent a major part of her childhood in hospitals or at home and during this phase she developed love for drawing. While in second grade, she became a class artist and one of the favourites of her school principal too.
She enrolled in the City College of New York to study art in 1950 wherein she completed her Bachelor of Science in 1955 and Master of Arts in 1959. In the meantime, she studied with artists Robert Gwathmey, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and was introduced to printmaker Robert Blackburn.
In addition, in 1997 Ringgold received two honorary doctorates, one in Education from Wheelock College in Boston, and the second in Philosophy from Molloy College in New York.
Ringgold taught art in the New York City public school system from her graduation until 1973. She divided her time between New York and a teaching position at the University of California at San Diego after the mid-1970s.
In the early 1960s Ringgold began to make overtly political paintings, in part inspired by reading James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka (then Le Roi Jones), who wrote of their lives as black men within a white American culture. She made a series of paintings entitled "The American People", followed by the mural "The Flag Is Bleeding" and a large painting "U. S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Advent of Black Power", which consisted of 100 frames of human faces cropped to reveal only eyes and noses. Presented in a grid, like a sheet of postage stamps, ten percent of the faces were black, reflecting the percentage of black Americans in the population at large.
In the early 1970s Ringgold completed a series of Slave Rape paintings in which female figures, the victims of rape, were presented in lush brocade frames, inspired by Tibetan wall hangings. All her work of this period was figurative, executed in a simplified, cubist-like style which Ringgold claimed to be a derivation of African art.
By the mid-1970s she was making masks, heads of women she had known, which then evolved into large full-size portraits made of stuffed fabric entitled "The Harlem Series". These were of prominent Harlem residents such as politician Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and basketball player Wilt Chamberlain, as well as southerner Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been dead by then. Her mother helped her sew these portrait-sculptures made of foam rubber, coconut heads and yarn wigs, which later became props and characters in performances she created in collaboration with her two daughters, who wrote stories and scripts. In 1981 Ringgold made an assemblage sculpture about the chain of slayings of Black children in Atlanta, Georgia, in which she placed small stuffed figures bound in wire, each with the name and photo of a victim, against a white background, suggesting a chessboard on which the children were pawns.
Later Ringgold made a series of narrative quilts, in appreciation of traditional women's handiwork, which contained pictures accompanied by texts telling their stories. One is titled "Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima?" and another "Street Story", which tells the story of a ghetto boy who goes through a series of family tragedies to finally become a wealthy writer in Hollywood, accompanied by pictures of the physical decline of the apartment building in which he grew up. She also worked on performances to accompany her story quilts.
Throughout her career as an artist, Faith Ringgold was always politically involved in black and feminist issues. In 1966 she participated in the first black art exhibition in Harlem after its renaissance in the 1930s along with Romare Bearden, Ernie Crichlow, Norman Lewis, and Betty Blayton. In 1968 she joined the Art Workers' Coalition with critic Lucy Lippard and sculptor Carl Andre and demonstrated for the inclusion of Afro-American artists in exhibitions and purchases by major New York museums. In 1970 she participated in the Ad Hoc Woman's Art Group, which successfully pressured the Whitney Museum of American Art to include for the first time in its history the work of two black women artists - Barbara Chase-Riboud and Betye Saar - in its Sculpture Biennial. During that same year she was arrested for organizing "The People's Flag Show" at the Judson Church, which protested against laws governing the use of the image of the American flag. In 1985 she participated in the Guerrilla Girls all-woman exhibition at the Palladium in New York.
In 1967 and 1970 Ringgold had one-person shows at Spectrum Gallery in New York, an artist-run gallery in which she was the first black to participate. She was the subject of a ten-year retrospective exhibition at Rutgers University in 1973 and of a 20-year retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1984 and at the College of Wooster Art Museum in 1985.
In 1991 Crown Press published her book "Tar Beach", which she wrote and illustrated, and the following year published her book Aunt Harriet's Underground Railroad in The Sky.
She worked as a professor of art at the University of California at San Diego until 2002.
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.
Ringgold resides with her second husband in a home in Englewood, New Jersey, where she has lived and maintained a steady studio practice since 1992.
Faith's religious beliefs are described as Protestant.
Politics
Throughout her career as an artist, Faith Ringgold was always politically involved in black and feminist issues. She has been an activist since the 1970s, participating in several feminist and anti-racist organizations. Ringgold was even arrested on November 13, 1970 for participating in protest activity - she organized "The People's Flag Show" at the Judson Church, which protested against laws governing the use of the image of the American flag.
The political ferment of the late 1960s caused considerable upheaval in the New York art world, and many artists collectively demanded that public institutions and museums expand their programs to include a broader range of art, to show and purchase artwork by artists outside the "mainstream". New galleries opened, often publicly funded, whose intention was not to sell or buy art but to show significant art that existed outside of the established system of commercial galleries and museums, which were often closed to outsiders. Faith Ringgold participated in many of these protest activities and usually showed her work in alternative places.
Views
Quotations:
"You can't sit around and wait for somebody to say who you are. You need to write it and paint it and do it."
"Creativity helps us realize that we don't have to understand everything. We can enjoy something - feel it and use it - without ever fully comprehending it."
"When they're looking at my work, they're looking at a painting and they're able to accept it better because it is also a quilt."
"It’s a fabulous way to work because what happens is I can roll the painting up - I don’t care how big it is - and take it myself."
Membership
In 1968 Ringgold joined the Art Workers' Coalition. Besides, she and her daughter Michele Wallace founded Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL). 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 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.
Art Workers' Coalition
1968
National Black Feminist Organization
1974
Coast-to-Coast National Women Artists of Color Projects
1988
Connections
In 1950 Faith Ringgold married Robert Earl Wallace, a jazz pianist. They had two daughters, Barbara and Michele. However, the couple divorced several years later, because of his heroin addiction.