Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold grew up in Harlem with chronic asthma that kept her close to home, where her mother, a fashion designer, taught her to sew and her father filled the house with stories. Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes lived nearby. When she enrolled at City College of New York in 1948 to study art, the school barred women from its fine-arts major outright, so she took an art-education degree instead, earning a bachelor's in 1955 and a master's in 1959 while studying under painter Robert Gwathmey. She spent nearly two decades after that teaching art in New York City public schools, painting on her own time, before a gallery owner's rejection of her work in the 1960s pushed her toward the paintings that would actually get her noticed.

Her paintings of the 1960s put the civil rights and feminist movements onto canvas from a Black woman's point of view, The Flag Is Bleeding and Die, both 1967, work galleries found too confrontational to hang. She was arrested in 1970 protesting the Whitney Museum's exclusion of Black and women artists, co-founded activist collectives with her daughter, and in 1972 painted a mural for incarcerated women at Rikers Island. A trip to Amsterdam that year, where Tibetan thangkas showed her how fabric could frame a painting, led her to quilting her mother had taught her. When publishers turned down her memoir manuscript in the 1980s, she started writing text onto the quilts, beginning with Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima? in 1983. Her children's book Tar Beach, adapted from a 1988 quilt, won the Coretta Scott King Award in 1991.

Recognition came only after Ringgold spent years being told her work was too much. A Chase Manhattan Bank representative pulled back from a flag-themed piece in 1969 once he registered the phrase worked into its stripes, and mainstream galleries mostly declined to show the American People paintings at all through the decade that made her name in retrospect. Her personal life carried its own weight before any of that: her first marriage, to jazz pianist Robert Earl Wallace, produced two daughters and ended in 1954 because of his heroin addiction, leaving Ringgold to raise Michele and Barbara largely on her own until she remarried in 1962. The museum world that now holds her work, the Guggenheim, the Met, the Whitney she once picketed, spent the first half of her career mostly declining to look at it.

Ringgold died at her home in Englewood, New Jersey, on April 13, 2024, at 93, having lived to see a full reversal of the art world's early verdict on her. A 2022 retrospective at the New Museum in New York traveled on to San Francisco, Paris and Chicago, and by then she held more than eighty awards and twenty-three honorary doctorates. A school in Hayward, California, was named for her in 2007, and Tar Beach, the picture book she almost did not get to write, has stayed continuously in print since 1991, introducing the story-quilt technique to generations of children who will never see the paintings galleries once refused to hang.

Faith Ringgold's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Flag Is Bleeding artwork
  From the American People Series 1967
• For the Women's House artwork
  Mural for incarcerated women at Rikers Island 1972
• Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima? artwork
  Her first story quilt 1983
• Tar Beach book
  Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration — based on her 1988 quilt 1991

• October 8, 1930 aged 0 Born in Harlem, New York City
• 1955 aged ~25 Earns a B.A. in art education from City College of New York
• 1967 aged ~37 Paints The Flag Is Bleeding and Die
• November 13, 1970 aged 40 Arrested protesting the Whitney Museum's exclusion of Black and women artists
• 1972 aged ~42 Completes For the Women's House, a mural for incarcerated women at Rikers Island
• 1983 aged ~53 Creates her first story quilt, Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima?
• 1991 aged ~61 Tar Beach wins the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration
• 2022 aged ~92 A retrospective opens at the New Museum and tours to three more cities
• April 13, 2024 aged 93 Dies in Englewood, New Jersey

• Duke Ellington 1899–1974
  Composer and bandleader who expanded the artistic ambition and vocabulary of jazz. childhood Harlem neighbor
• Langston Hughes 1901–1967
  Harlem Renaissance poet and writer whose work celebrated Black life and challenged racial injustice. childhood Harlem neighbor
• Kara Walker b. 1969
  Contemporary artist whose silhouette installations confront the brutal history of American slavery and racism. later Black woman artist confronting similar territory