“If one can, anyone can, all you gotta do is try”
Faith Ringgold was an American painter, writer, educator, sculptor, performance artist, and activist best known for her painted story quilts. Over a career spanning more than six decades, she created art that confronted racism, sexism, inequality, family memory, Black history, and the expansive imaginative life of Black women and children. Her work moved freely between painting, textiles, printmaking, sculpture, performance, and literature, challenging the artificial boundary between “fine art” and so-called craft.
Born Faith Willi Jones on 8 October 1930 in Harlem, New York, Ringgold grew up in the Sugar Hill neighborhood during the cultural afterlife of the Harlem Renaissance. Her mother, Willi Posey, was a skilled seamstress, fashion designer, and dressmaker whose work introduced Ringgold to color, fabric, pattern, and the creative possibilities of clothing and textiles. Ringgold also inherited stories about women in her family, including an enslaved ancestor who had made quilts on a plantation. These family histories later became central to her understanding of quilting as a language of memory, survival, artistry, and storytelling.
Ringgold studied at the City College of New York, earning a Bachelor of Science in visual art in 1955 and a Master of Arts in visual art in 1959. She began teaching art in New York City public schools while developing her own artistic practice. In the early 1960s, she traveled in Europe with her mother and daughters, studying the work of modern masters including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Vincent van Gogh. The experience sharpened her sense of both the possibilities and exclusions of the art world.
In 1963, Ringgold began her landmark American People series. These paintings confronted the myths of racial harmony in the United States and depicted the tensions, violence, and unequal power of the civil-rights era from the perspective of a Black woman artist. Works such as The American People Series #20: Die (1967) placed Black and white figures together in scenes of collective conflict, making visible the human cost of racism and segregation.
Ringgold’s art was inseparable from her activism. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, she protested the exclusion of Black artists and women artists from major New York museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art. In 1970, she was arrested with John Hendricks and Jean Tuche after participating in The People’s Flag Show at Judson Memorial Church, an exhibition that challenged laws restricting the use and display of the American flag. The artists became known as the “Judson Three.”
In 1971, Ringgold co-founded Where We At, a collective created to support and exhibit the work of Black women artists. The group took its name from the phrase “Where We At,” meaning both a literal location and a demand for recognition: Where were Black women in the institutional art world, and where would they create space for themselves? Through collective organizing, exhibitions, teaching, and public protest, Ringgold helped build a more visible and self-determined Black feminist art movement.
During the 1970s, Ringgold expanded beyond conventional canvas painting. She created soft sculptures, posters, masks, dolls, and unstretched painted canvases bordered with fabric, influenced by Tibetan thangkas. Working closely with her mother, she made elaborate textile masks, often using fabric, beads, raffia, and other materials. These works combined visual art with performance, music, movement, and storytelling. Her 1976 performance work The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro used masks, life-size figures, painted textiles, voice, music, and dance to confront the meaning of the United States Bicentennial from a Black perspective.
Ringgold’s first quilt, Echoes of Harlem (1980), was made in collaboration with Willi Posey. The large work joins hand-painted cotton, quilted fabric, and thirty individual faces, each conveying a distinct mood or personality. Ringgold and her mother completed it as their final work together before Posey’s death in 1981. Echoes of Harlem opened a new direction in Ringgold’s art, bringing textile practice, painting, community memory, and visual storytelling into one powerful form.
In 1983, Ringgold made what she called her first story quilt, Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima? Combining painted images, quilted fabric, and handwritten text, the work reimagined the Aunt Jemima advertising stereotype as a complex Black woman whose life includes family, business, struggle, and self-definition. Ringgold used the story quilt to claim the freedom to publish her own words and construct narratives that mainstream culture had either erased or distorted.
Her story quilts became her most recognizable artistic achievement. They brought together narrative painting, fabric borders, quilting, handwriting, history, autobiography, and fantasy. Ringgold’s quilts did not simply illustrate stories: they created a new visual-literary form in which text, image, and textile held equal power. They also made space for Black women’s voices, domestic histories, artistic collaborations, and dreams within institutions that had long marginalized them.Among her best-known works is Woman on a Bridge #1 of 5: Tar Beach (1988), which tells the story of Cassie Louise Lightfoot, a young Black girl who imagines herself flying above her Harlem rooftop and across New York City. In Cassie’s dream, she claims the George Washington Bridge and the city’s buildings as symbols of freedom, possibility, and ownership. The work became the basis for Ringgold’s celebrated children’s book Tar Beach, published in 1991.
Ringgold also transformed art history through works such as The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles (1991). In this imagined scene, Black women—including Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Madam C. J. Walker—gather in a sunflower field at Arles, France, alongside Vincent van Gogh. By placing these women at the center of a European art-historical landscape, Ringgold revised the visual canon and created a joyful genealogy of Black women’s creativity, leadership, and collective work.
From 1984 until 2002, Ringgold taught in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, where she became professor emerita. She continued to create, write, teach, lecture, and exhibit internationally throughout her later life. Major public collections include the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Ringgold wrote and illustrated numerous children’s books, including Tar Beach, which received a Caldecott Honor and the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award. She also wrote a memoir, We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold, published in 1995. Her literary work extended the concerns of her visual art: family, freedom, history, Black girlhood, imagination, and the right to tell one’s own story.
Her contributions received widespread recognition, including National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and more than twenty honorary doctorates. In 2022, the New Museum in New York presented the major retrospective Faith Ringgold: American People, reaffirming the scale and continuing relevance of her work.
Faith Ringgold died at her home in Englewood, New Jersey, on 13 April 2024. Her legacy lives in her paintings, quilts, books, performances, activism, and the generations of artists, writers, educators, and young readers she inspired. Her guiding belief—“If one can, anyone can, all you gotta do is try”—captures the generosity and insistence that animated her work: art belongs not only to museums and markets, but to the stories people tell, the materials they inherit, and the worlds they dare to imagine.
Sources:
https://whitney.org/artists/14995
https://americanart.si.edu/artist/faith-ringgold-7236
https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3719
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Faith-Ringgold
https://www.studiomuseum.org/artworks/echoes-of-harlem
https://www.studiomuseum.org/artists/faith-ringgold
https://visarts.ucsd.edu/people/in-memoriam/faith-ringgold.html
