NEW YORK — Faith Ringgold, an award-winning author and artist who broke barriers for Black artists and became famous for her richly colored and detailed quilts that combined painting, textiles and storytelling, has died. She was 93 years old.
The artist’s assistant, Grace Matthews, told the Associated Press that Ringgold died Friday night at her home in Englewood, New Jersey. Matthews said Ringgold was in poor health.
Ringgold’s highly personal artworks can be found in public and private collections across the country and beyond, from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art to New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Atlanta’s High Museum of Fine Art . But her rise to prominence as a black artist was not easy in an art world dominated by white men and in a political culture where black men were the leading voices for civil rights. Founder of the Where We At artist collective for black women in 1971, Ringgold became a social activist, often protesting the lack of representation of black and female artists in American museums.
“I became a feminist out of disgust with the way women were marginalized in the art world,” she told The New York Times in 2019. “I began incorporating this perspective into my work, with a particular focus on black women as slaves and their sexual exploitation.”
In her first illustrated children’s book, “Tar Beach,” the spirited heroine flies over the George Washington Bridge. The story symbolized women’s self-realization and the freedom to confront “this huge male icon – the bridge,” she explained.
The story is based on his narrative quilt of the same name, now in the permanent collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Although her works often deal with issues of race and gender, her folk style is vibrant, upbeat, and joyful and often recalls her warm memories of her life in Harlem.
Ringgold introduced quilting into her work in the 1970s after seeing Tibetan brocade paintings called thangkas. They inspired her to create patchwork fabric borders, or frames, with handwritten narratives around her acrylic canvas paintings. For her 1982 storybook, “Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima,” Ringgold confronted women’s struggles by undermining the black “mommy” stereotype and telling the story of a successful African-American businesswoman named Jemima Blakey.
“Aunt Jemima conveys the same negative connotation as Uncle Tom, simply because of her appearance,” she told The New York Times in a 1990 interview.
Soon after, Ringgold produced a series of 12 quilt paintings titled “The French Collection,” again weaving narrative, biographical, and cultural references to African American and Western art.
One of the works in the series, “Dancing at the Louvre,” depicts Ringgold’s daughters dancing in the Paris museum, seemingly oblivious to the “Mona Lisa” and other European masterpieces on the walls. In other works in the series, Ringgold portrays giants of black culture such as poet Langston Hughes alongside Pablo Picasso and other European masters.
Among his socially conscious works is a three-panel “9/11 Peace Stories Quilt” that Ringgold designed and constructed in collaboration with New York City students for the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Each of the panels contains 12 squares with images and words that address the question “what will you do for peace?” It was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
In 2014, his “Groovin High,” a depiction of an energetic dance hall evocative of Harlem’s famous Savoy Ballroom, was featured on a billboard along New York City’s High Line park.
Ringgold also created a number of public works. “Portraits of People,” comprised of 52 individual glass mosaics depicting sports, performance and music figures, adorn the Los Angeles Civic Center subway station. “Flying Home: Harlem Heroes and Heroines” are two mosaic murals in a Harlem subway station that feature figures such as Dinah Washington, Sugar Ray Robinson and Malcolm X.
In one of his recent books, “Harlem Renaissance Party,” Ringgold introduces young readers to Hughes and other black artists of the 1920s. Other children’s books feature Rosa Parks, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Born in Harlem in 1930, Ringgold was the daughter of a seamstress and fashion designer with whom she frequently collaborated. She attended City College of New York, where she earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in art. She was an art professor at the University of California, San Diego from 1987 to 2002.
Ringgold’s motto, posted on his website, states: “If anyone can, anyone can, all you have to do is try.”
This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
