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In Memoriam: Faith Ringgold

Professor Emerita, Visual ArtsFaith Ringgold in front of Tar Beach 2. Photo by Kathy Willens Fair Use

May 14, 2024

It is with deep sorrow that we acknowledge the passing of Faith Ringgold, the renowned artist, author, and activist who was Professor Emeritus of Visual Arts. She died, at age 93, on April 13, 2024 in Englewood, N.J.

Born in 1930 in Harlem, New York, Faith Ringgold received her B.S. and M.A. degrees in visual art from the City College of New York in 1955 and 1959. The recipient of more than 75 awards, including 23 honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees, she was a professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego from 1984 to 2002. For her work of more than sixty years, Faith Ringgold has been recognized internationally as one of the most iconic forces shaping the postwar art and visual culture of the United States. The extraordinary scope of her influence and impact is reflected in the life of her work, which has been exhibited at institutions ranging from the White House in Washington, D.C. to the Women’s House of Detention on Riker’s Island, where a mural depicting women in careers identified as out of reach by the women who she interviewed there hung for 50 years before it was moved to the Brooklyn Museum for preservation. In the permanent collections of world-class museums such as the Victoria and Albert, the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and New York’s American Craft Museum, her works are also held in the Clinton Presidential Library and the New Brunswick Special Collections Repository of Rutgers, the land grant university in the state where Ringgold chose to make her home for the last three decades of her life.

When it was acquired by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, The American People Series #20: Die (1967), a work painted while Ringgold was supporting herself and her daughters as a teacher in the New York City public school system, was displayed next to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, reflecting the landmark status given to her work in the international history of art by the same institution that had housed Guernica, the Picasso that depicts the horror of the Spanish Civil War, for safekeeping at the request of the Spanish republic during the Second World War, during which time Faith Ringgold encountered the painting firsthand. “Freedom of speech is absolutely imperative,” Ringgold stated about her The American People Series, which includes a work, The American People Series #18: The Flag is Bleeding (acquired by the National Gallery of Art), in which the American flag figures prominently as the blood-spattered screen behind which stands a human chain of bleeding subjects linked at the elbows. “You can’t have art of any kind without freedom of speech,” she reiterated, referring to the expressive value of this work of 1967 for which she was arrested and charged with desecration of the American flag at an art show she helped to curate at the Judson Church in Greenwich Village. “We thought of the American flag as our symbol of freedom,” she explained, but we were losing our freedom in the 60s. All the blood laying all over the sidewalk. Nothing about it in the papers. I mean silence. Like it didn’t happen.”[i]

In painting, sculpture, quilts, masks, dolls, performance, and authored and illustrated books, Ringgold explored the politics of race, gender, class, family, community, and personal experience, drawing on Black women’s pictorial, narrative, and craft traditions in an art scene initially dominated by abstraction and minimalism. Beginning in the late 1960s, she helped to organize demonstrations against the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, calling for women and Black artists to be better represented in shows and collections. When in 1970 the groups Art Strike and the Art Workers’ Coalition failed to include women and Black artists in their plans for the Liberated Venice Biennale, a theme established in protest against the U.S. bombing of Cambodia and institutionalized racism and sexism, Ringgold, with her daughters Barbara F. Wallace and Michele Wallace, formed Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL), a group dedicated to countering the identity biases and assumptions of their mainly male AWC comrades. The group went on to organize exhibitions and protest against artworld exclusion in collaboration with the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee. During the early 1960s Ringgold traveled in Europe. She created her first political paintings, The American People Series, from 1963 to 1967 and had her first and second solo exhibitions at the Spectrum Gallery in New York. She began to produce soft sculptures and masks, using the latter in masked performances of the 1970s and 1980s, and she traveled to Nigeria and Ghana in the 1970s to study the masks that influenced her practice from that time.

In the early 1970s Ringgold began making works incorporating cloth. Ringgold had seen 15th century Tibetan and Nepalese cloth mural works called tankas, paintings of deities and other figures with spiritual meaning surrounded by smaller figures and patterns on cotton or silk, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 1972, the year of the National Black Political Convention and the Equal Rights Amendment in the U.S. Her first tanka-inspired series, titled Slave Rape, consisted of three works on canvas depicting the artist and her two daughters in abstract landscapes, each surrounded by a quilted border of brocades and embroidery designed by Ringgold's mother, the clothing designer and seamstress Willi Posey. Individually, the three works are titled “Fear (fear will make you weak),” “Run (you may get away),” and “Fight (to save your life).” In 2019, the series was presented in the United States for the first time since 1973, when it had been on view at Rutgers for a retrospective of 58 of the artist's works completed in the previous decade. That exhibition included watercolor landscapes by Ringgold incorporating text written by her daughter Michele Wallace. About this series, which she titled Political Landscapes, Ringgold stated:  “All the political people are buried in the ground, which makes the landscape political," Ringgold is quoted as stating. Ringgold’s first story quilt, Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?, was written and sewn in 1983. She would take up the theme of family, home, and landscape again in Slave Rape Story Quilt (1985), a mixed media quilt in which she used African textile styles and techniques such as tie dye along with text and pictorial graphics to reconnect the intergenerational narratives of Beata and her mother, women who were enslaved, with their ancestral homeland, the technique of stitching and mending signifying the labor of repair following trauma and damage.

Through her soft sculptures and quilts, Ringgold challenged accepted hierarchies of medium and form in figurative, pictorial, and narrative works by incorporating regional and ancestral traditions and methods to craft scenes that made critical interventions in dialogs about contemporary politics of race, gender, and personal history and memory, bringing the social history of forms of expressive practice in the domestic sphere and in Black cultures into galleries and museums. Intergenerational  was a central aspect of Faith Ringgold’s practice in textiles in particular. Echoes of Harlem (1980) was one of numerous works made in collaboration with her mother. Linguist Barbara F. Wallace and writer and scholar Michele Wallace, Professor Emeritus at CUNY, have been active in organizing, advocacy, and activism with their mother throughout their careers, and Michele Wallace has written and spoken widely about the work and legacy (see a listing of her publications below).

At UC San Diego, Faith Ringgold brought her dynamic mixed media approach and her focus on social history and identity to classes in studio art featuring textiles along with writing, mixed media, and socially engaged practice, an approach that would become a cornerstone of the department’s identity. She was an influential voice in the department during its broadening of vision to include art history and media among its majors. Her many books for children have made a profound contribution to advancing the role of the arts in education. Building upon her artworks to convey their themes and messages to wider audiences, Faith Ringgold wrote and illustrated more than 20 books for children and adults. Her first book, Tar Beach (Crown, 1991), won over 20 awards, including the Caldecott Honor and the Coretta Scott King award for the best-illustrated children’s book of 1991. An animated version with Natalie Cole performing voiceover was produced by HBO in 2010. The book is based on the Tar Beach painted story quilt, a work from the 1988 The Woman on a Bridge Series that is held in the permanent collection of the Guggenheim. Faith Ringgold’s second children’s book, Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky, was published by Crown in 1992, and in 1993 Hyperion brought out Dinner at Aunt Connie’s, a children’s book based on The Dinner Quilt (1986). In Harlem Renaissance Party (Harper Collins 2015) and We Came to America (Alfred A Knopf 2016), she brought foundational histories of the Harlem Renaissance, Indigenous Americans, migration, and the Middle Passage to child readers through images adapted from works such as The American Collection, her painted and sewn surveys of U.S. history. Faith Ringgold’s autobiography and first book for an adult readership, We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold (Bullfinch 1995), was released in paperback by Duke University Press in 2005.

In 2022, the New Museum in New York presented a comprehensive retrospective of Faith Ringgold’s work over the past sixty years (“Faith Ringgold: American People”) in an exhibition that included a substantial catalog edited by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari.[ii] This retrospective was carried forward in extended form by the Musée Picasso Paris as “Faith Ringgold: Black is Beautiful” in 2023. Her work was also recently featured in a retrospective exhibition at the Bergen Gallery, a community college venue in the North Jersey neighborhood where she lived for thirty years, and about which she produced Coming to Jones Road, a series of image and text works in painting and fabric that tell an ancestral narrative about the struggle of intergenerational resistance and resilience in the process of establishing roots in the predominantly white suburban neighborhood to which she had moved from Harlem. Her work has been represented worldwide exclusively by ACA Galleries since 1995.

Faith Ringgold was preceded in death by her husband, Burdette Ringgold, who died in 2020. She is survived by her daughters, the linguist Barbara Faith Wallace and the feminist cultural critic and historian Michele Faith Wallace; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. UC San Diego is joined by an international community that stands in honor of the profound life and legacy of the American artist Faith Ringgold. Plans for an event celebrating her work will be announced in the Visual Arts Department Newsletter in the fall of 2024. Donations in honor of Faith Ringgold can be made to the Anyone Can Fly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization devoted to expanding the canon to include artists of the African diaspora and introducing African American artists and art traditions to children and adult audiences through grants to scholars and projects with elementary school children. The Foundation is currently preserving the artist's New Jersey home and studio as a showcase for art of the African diaspora.

https://www.anyonecanflyfoundation.org/  

The Faith Ringgold website is found at  https://www.faithringgold.com/ 

The video "Critique and Connection in the Works of Faith Ringgold," talks about Faith Ringgold by Michele Wallace, Joan Kee, Jacqueline Francis, and Susan Kahan hosted by the San Francisco Fine Art Museums in 2023, may be viewed here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE27m9Khlzk

Publications by Michele Wallace about Faith Ringgold

Michele Wallace, “The Mona Lisa Interview” (c. 1998)
https://www.academia.edu/9849015/The_Mona_Lisa_Interview
http:/mjsoulpictures.blogspot.com

Michele Wallace, “We Came to America by Faith Ringgold and the Linda Lee Alter Collection of Art by Women at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,” The Female Gaze: Women Artist Making Their World, edited by Robert Cozzollino (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2012).
https://www.amazon.com/Female-Gaze-Women-Artists-Making/dp/1555953891

Michele Walace, “American Black: Faith Ringgold’s Black Light Series,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Number 29 (Fall 2011), pp.50-61.
https://read.dukeupress.edu/nka/article-abstract/2011/29/50/48879/America-Black-Faith-Ringgold-s-Paintings-of-the?redirectedFrom=fulltext

American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold’s Paintings of the 1960s, edited by Michele Wallace and Thom Collins (SUNY Purchase, Neuberger Museum 2010),
https://nmwa.org/exhibitions/american-people-black-light/
https://www.amazon.com/American-People-Black-Light-Ringgolds/dp/0979562937

[i] https://www.culturetype.com/2021/10/24/national-gallery-of-art-acquires-faith-ringgolds-flag-is-bleeding-painting-may-be-museums-most-important-purchase-of-a-single-work-of-contemporary-art-since-1976/

[ii] The exhibition, which travelled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the De Young Museum in San Francisco, was curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, and Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator, with Madeline Weisburg, Curatorial Assistant. See: https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/faith-ringgold-american-people. For the catalog, which was published by Phaidon, see: Faith Ringgold: American People edited by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari, https://www.phaidon.com/store/art/faith-ringgold-american-people-9781838664220/. For the Musée Picasso exhibition see: https://www.museepicassoparis.fr/en/faith-ringgold.