The character arc of Faith Ringgold

Who was Faith Ringgold?

No publisher would take the book. So she wrote it onto quilts.

She was born in Harlem Hospital, the youngest of three, to parents descended from working-class families displaced by the Great Migration. Her mother was a fashion designer who taught her to sew and work with fabric; her father worked a range of jobs and was an avid storyteller. Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes lived round the corner, and her childhood friend Sonny Rollins practised saxophone at her family parties. Chronic asthma kept her in, so she drew. She was firm that growing up in Depression-era Harlem did not mean she was poor and oppressed: she said she was protected from oppression and surrounded by a loving family.

In 1948 she enrolled at City College to major in art and was made to major in art education instead, because the college only allowed women into certain majors. She married the jazz pianist Robert Earl Wallace in 1950 and had two daughters in 1952; they separated because of his heroin addiction. She took her degree in 1955 and taught in the New York public school system.

The turn came out of a rejection. A New York gallery owner turned her work down, and in 1963 she painted her first political collection, the American People Series, looking at the country she was living in from a woman point of view. Her explanation is flat and complete: it was the 1960s and she could not act like everything was okay, she could not paint landscapes in the 1960s, there was too much going on. The Black Light Series followed from 1967, after she noticed that western art was built around white and light and contrast while African art used darker colours and built contrast out of colour itself, and she went after what she called a more affirmative Black aesthetic.

In 1972 she installed For the Women House at the women facility on Rikers Island, built from long interviews with women held there and showing women in professional and civil roles. It was her first public commission and is widely regarded as her first feminist work, and it led to an organisation that brings art into prisons. That same summer she went to Europe, and in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam she found fourteenth and fifteenth century Tibetan thangkas, paintings mounted on textile. That room changed her materials. She began putting fabric borders round her own work.

Her mother, a Harlem clothing designer and seamstress, collaborated with her and had taught her to quilt in the African American tradition, as her grandmother had, having learned it from her own mother, who was enslaved. Their first quilt together, Echoes of Harlem, came in 1980. Then in 1983 she did the thing she is remembered for. Nobody would publish the autobiography she had been working on, so, in her words, she began writing stories on her quilts instead, so that when the quilts were hung up or photographed for a book, people could still read her stories. The first was Who Is Afraid of Aunt Jemima, which takes the most maligned stereotype of a Black woman and rewrites her as a matriarch and a restaurateur. She wrote and illustrated over a dozen children books, won a Caldecott Honor and a Coretta Scott King Award, taught at Pratt and at the University of California San Diego, and her work is in the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The moments

Faith Ringgold's timeline.

Faith Ringgold: frequently asked questions

What people ask about her line.

Sources

• Faith Ringgold, English Wikipedia biography.
• Her interview with the Crocker Art Museum, as quoted there.
• Her 2019 interview with Hyperallergic about the American People Series.
• Her childrens books, and the Caldecott Honor and Coretta Scott King Award records.