Born Faith Jones in 1930, Ringgold grew up in the creative milieu of Harlem’s Sugar Hill neighborhood. Her mother, a fashion designer, encouraged her to create art as a distraction from chronic asthma. Ringgold later graduated from New York’s City College with a BA in arts education in 1955 and an MFA in 1959.

At a time when many American artists focused on form and style over social issues, Ringgold distinguished herself by directly confronting racial injustice in her art. “Everything was political in the sixties,” she later said, “except the visual arts.” Recognition of that reality inspired Ringgold’s “American People” series (1963 to 1967): figurative paintings that shattered the notion of the American dream through depictions of racial inequality and violence.

Ringgold also worked to connect the feminist and civil rights movements with the art world through political action. Beginning in the 1960s, she fought to increase the visibility of Black artists by organizing protests against the Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York. She also co-founded several organizations to support Black women artists, including the “Where We At” Black Women Artists collective in 1971.

Ringgold is best known for her story quilts: paintings and text on quilted fabric that illustrate autobiographical, historical, and imagined scenes about the Black experience. She created her first story quilt with her mother in 1980, inspired by a desire to work in mediums outside Western art’s white male-dominated canon. A decade later, Ringgold transformed her story quilts into a series of award-winning children’s books.

Among her many awards, Ringgold received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation as well as 23 honorary doctorates. She was also a distinguished educator, as both a teacher in the New York City public schools (1955 to 1973) and a professor at the University of California at San Diego (1985 to 2002).