5 Fast Facts: Faith Ringgold

Blog Category:  From the Collection
Close-up photograph of a painted quilt shows a medium-dark skinned woman dancing exuberantly. There is a white flower in her hair, and she wears dangling gold earrings and gold loops around her neck.
April 18, 2018
4/18/18

Impress your friends with five fast facts about Faith Ringgold (b. 1930), whose work is on view in NMWA’s collection galleries.

Faith Ringgold stands and speaks, gesturing with her hands, in front of her portrait paintings. She is a dark-skinned adult woman wearing colorful clothing and a black sweater, including a yellow head wrap and chunky jewelry—rings, earrings, necklaces, and bracelets.
Faith Ringgold discusses her work on view at NMWA in the 2013 exhibition American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold’s Paintings of the 1960s; Photo: Laura Hoffman, NMWA

1. Get Real

Faith Ringgold considers her “American People” series, begun in the summer of 1963, the start of her mature artistic work. Using a style she called “Super Realism,” Ringgold explored what was happening to black people in the United States and commented upon the Civil Rights movement from a woman’s point of view.

2. Let Me Demonstrate

In 1968, when the Whitney Museum of American Art neglected to include any African American artists in its exhibition of 1930s sculpture, Ringgold helped organize demonstrations. She later co-founded the Ad Hoc Women’s Art Committee, agitating for equal inclusion of women artists in the Whitney Biennial. In 1971 she co-founded the Where We At Black Women Artists collective, a socially conscious group seeking more exhibition opportunities for black women.

3. Tell Me a Story

Ringgold’s famed story quilts were inspired by her fashion-designer mother and Tibetan thangkas (paintings on cloth framed with brocade). She draws on traditions of quilt-making to tell stories about herself and the African American experience more broadly. Her quilts pay tribute to a range of historical time periods and noted cultural figures such as Jacob Lawrence, Josephine Baker, and Zora Neale Hurston.

Faith Ringgold, American Collection #4: Jo Baker’s Bananas, 1997; Acrylic on canvas with pieced fabric border, 80 1/2 x 76 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Purchased with funds donated by the Estate of Barbara Bingham Moore, Olga V. Hargis Family Trusts, and the Members’ Acquisition Fund; Photo by Lee Stalsworth

4. The Write Stuff

Ringgold is also an award-winning author. She has written and illustrated numerous children’s books, including Tar Beach (1991) and Harlem Renaissance Party (2015), as well as an autobiography titled We Flew over the Bridge (1995).

5. There’s an App for That

A huge fan of the Japanese number puzzle Sudoku, Ringgold created a visual art variation of the game in the form of an app called Quiltuduko. It uses blocks of color and pattern, inspired partly by her own art. Solve the puzzle and you’ve created not an uninspiring grid of numbers but a work of art! It rolled out on iTunes in 2014, when Ringgold was 84 years old.

Visit NMWA and see Ringgold’s work American Collection #4: Jo Baker’s Bananas (1997) on view in the museum’s third floor galleries.

About the Author

—Deborah Gaston is the director of education and digital engagement at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

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