Faith Ringgold

Folk artist Faith Ringgold is an African-American artist and author who was born in 1930 in Harlem, New York City, and who is best known for her large, painted story quilts. As a child, she was taught to sew fabrics creatively by her mother, a professional fashion designer; and to make quilts by her great-great-grandmother. Ringgold's great-great-great grandmother had been a slave in her younger years, and made quilts for her white masters. Quilts in the African-American slave community served various purposes: warmth, preserving memories and events, storytelling, and even as "message boards" for the Underground Railroad to guide slaves on their way north to freedom. Some techniques common to African-American quilts included patchwork, applique and 'crazy' quilt; some characteristics included asymmetrical designs, bright colors and bold geometric shapes, which were spiritual symbols.
In 1950, she began studying art at New York's City College, concentrating on painting. When she graduated, she began teaching art in the New York City public schools. She had also married, and eventually had two daughters. She received her Master's degree in fine art in 1961. Soon after this, she went to Europe with her mother and her two daughters, to study the masters - Picasso, Matisse, Monet, and others. On her return, she began to paint seriously. This was in the early 1960's, when the Civil Rights movement was becoming a major force in American society, affecting her and her work greatly. In the later '60's, her work also reflected the turmoil and change all over the country, in bold, graphic images in dark colors which reflected both the dark skin of African-Americans, and perhaps the dark times. She became acquainted with feminist ideas during this time also, and worked as an activist for social change for women and blacks, particularly with regard to the American art museum system, which often omitted African-Americans and women from its exhibitions on a de facto basis.
In the 1970's, Ringgold continued to use her art to tell her own story, and in collaboration with her mother, began to sew fabric borders around her paintings, instead of stretching the canvas over wooden stretchers in the traditional manner. (She had seen this done in Tibetan paintings, called tankas.) Eventually, she and her mother produced a quilt together, a grid of 30 portraits of Harlem residents. When her mother died the following year, Ringgold decided to continue the family tradition of storytelling and history through writing, resulting in her first "story" quilt, called Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima? This piece told the story of a successful businesswoman, Aunt Jemima, in an attempt to reverse a negative African-American stereotype of black women. These pieces combine acrylic painting on canvas, quilted fabric and storytelling, often a handwritten text which frames the painted image. She also began to write stories for children, such as Tar Beach, which told the story of her childhood in Harlem, when her family ate and played cards on the roof on hot evenings. She had first told this story in a quilt/painting in 1988, which was seen by a publisher who suggested that she tell the story in book form, with her accompanying illustrations. This was her first of several children's books. These stories of fictional heroines present images not of oppression or deprivation; rather, they encourage children to 'take flight' and follow their dreams. They are often painted in a 'folk' style - no indications of perspective; two-dimensional patterning, rich colors, and no shading to indicate three-dimensional volume in the forms. She continued to comment on themes of race and gender and their particular relation to the art world, including art history. A story quilt/painting about Matisse, for example, comments on his use of black models, and the associations of dark skin and male desire with such images. A story quilt about Picasso concerns the early modernists' interest in African sculpture, and its influence on such movements as Cubism. Ringgold brings to the surface the irony of using "primitive" African sculpture to create modern "civilized" art. Africans had been considered savages by European civilization - thus enabling no compunctions about buying and selling them - and yet African art could be cited as avant garde and sophisticated, and used as a basis for modernist art - without any awareness of this irony. This series of works, called The French Collection, also depicted African-American artists alongside the "giants" of modern European culture: Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ringgold herself sit with and exchange aesthetic ideas with Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and Hemingway. Again, Ringgold subverts a racial and gender false assumption with gentle humor, rather than stridency
In the early 1980's, her work often contained a grid format; this combined the 20th century use of a grid of squares as a device to organize a composition, with the traditional use of grids (squares) in the craft of quilt-making. In the 1990's Ringgold continued to craft images dealing with the issues of slavery, racism, and sexism in her work, but combined with her folk-inspired style some aspects of modern and contemporary painting, such as Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. This included a loosened, more painterly style, and the use of repeated imagery, such as Andy Warhol used in his images of popular culture, for example his soup cans. Her color also became brighter, with rich hues of green, red, blue, as well as black, resulting in color relationships so finely tuned that they 'sing,' as well as dance visually (cause the viewer's eye to move around the painting) as they refer back to each other.