Artist Faith Ringgold

¶ … art and influences of African-American artist Faith Ringgold. FAITH RINGGOLD Ringgold was born in New York City on October 8, 1930. She grew up in Harlem. Her mother, Willi Posey Jones, was a fashion designer, and when Ringgold was young, she spent a lot of time at home, watching her mother work. She learned how to sew from her mother, and learned about working with different kinds of fabrics, and about drawing. The family was poor, but they were very interested in art and culture, and often took her to local museums.

She grew up with people in her neighborhood like Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, who influenced her in black culture and what blacks could accomplish. She attended City College in New York, where she studied art and got a degree from the School of Education, finishing her education with a master's degree in Fine Art in 1959.

Like other members of her family, she became a teacher, but she always created her own art and told stories, even during a time when there were very few black women artists, and even fewer places where they could show their work. Now, she works as a professor of fine art at the University of California at San Diego, and she has art studios in New York. She has been working as an artist and writer for over fifty years.

She has made over ninety-five story quilts, and numerous other paintings, illustrations, and drawings. Her educational background is clearly in art, along with the background that her family brought to her. In fact, in 1980 she made her first quilt with her mother. They name it "Echoes of Harlem." "Ringgold's mother wanted to incorporate some freehand cut baskets and triangles of different sizes on the quilt, motifs derived from the African-American quilting tradition. Earlier in this mother-daughter collaboration, the two had made tankas (quilted cloth-framed paintings) in the 1970s.

The first story quilt, 'Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima?' was completed in 1983. This medium was employed because Ringgold wanted to have her unedited words published and accepted as easily as her sculptures and paintings" (Robinson 20). Ringgold also made the quilt as a tribute to her mother, who had died a year after they finished "Echoes of Harlem." Therefore, her family and her background was a very large influence on her work, her choice of mediums, and her desire to share her African-American experiences with others.

She has said that she began working with cloth and in quilts because she felt that American art is very influenced by European art and methods, and that she wanted to use a medium that was different to express her heritage and background. Sometimes she includes fabrics or parts of quilts in her paintings, and sometimes she creates entire quilts, and then paints words on them, like the ones she created with her mother.

She began as a painter, but works in several mediums, including photography, sculpture, mixed media, and illustrating and writing children's books. "After I decided to be an artist, the first thing that I had to believe was that I, a black woman, could penetrate the art scene and that I could do so without sacrificing one iota of my blackness, or my femaleness, or my humanity. Faith Ringgold, 1985" (Guy-Sheftall 39). Ringgold had to work hard to become an artist and writer in the1960s.

She fought hard for her beliefs, including civil rights and the power of black people. She tried to show "black is beautiful" in her paintings, and wanted to celebrate her heritage. Ringgold tried to use colors that were like the colors of her own skin and hair to show shadows and light in her paintings. She was not allowed to join the group of black artists called "Spiral," because she was a woman, so she faced her own set of prejudices in addition to her color.

She has said that she began reading the literature of black writers like James Baldwin and Alain Locke, to find out more about herself, and her art. She also studied African art, and it influenced her choice of mediums. (Farris). In the 1970s, she became a feminist, partly because she was having trouble exhibiting her works in museums and galleries. Black women artists simply could not show their work in any major collection. Even white women artists fought against showing the black artist's work.

She helped found a group, Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL), which finally was able to get some exhibitions for black women artists. She began to paint "feminist murals" that showed women doing traditional and non-traditional types of work. During this time, she also began to frame her "Feminist Landscape" series with cloth, and write meaningful words on the cloth from famous African-American women of the past, like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. (Robinson).

She was determined to show women as strong individuals, with wants and needs that were different from men, and these themes have continued throughout her long and varied career. Today her feminist art is called "Afrofemcentrism." Ringgold's primary medium today is quilting, which for her has its origins in the South when slavery was still in effect. She uses quilting because it was a traditional needle art for black women in the South, and it is a more non-traditional art form.

She says the quilts can take as little as a month to make, or much longer for complicated designs. She also says that she paints the canvas in the traditional manner, and then quilts the edges, instead of stretching the canvas on a frame, as most paintings are stretched. Then she quilts the edge. In her story quilts, she then writes the story she wants to tell on the edge, with a black Sharpie marking pen. (Ringgold). She has won numerous awards.