Faith Ringgold

Harlem and an artistic education

Born Faith Willi Jones in Harlem, Ringgold grew up in Sugar Hill. Childhood asthma kept her at home for extended periods, where her mother encouraged drawing and making. At City College she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1955 and a master’s in 1959. Her American People paintings of 1963–1967 confronted the racial tensions around her.

Her mother, dressmaker Madame Willi Posey, also provided a living example of design and sewing as skilled work. The relationship later became an artistic collaboration.

Family knowledge was a resource with its own techniques and intelligence. Bringing it into an art practice made possible forms that a conventional separation of painting and sewing might overlook.

Sources for this section: [1] · [3]

Activism and changing forms

Ringgold taught in public schools and participated in civil-rights and museum protests. In 1971 she helped establish Where We At, a Black women artists’ group. Masks, fabric constructions and performance expanded her practice. Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima? in 1983 became her first story quilt, combining image and handwritten narrative.

Woman on a Bridge #1: Tar Beach, made in 1988, combines acrylic painting on canvas with a fabric border.

Its painted centre and surrounding story strips later fed into the 1991 children’s book Tar Beach. The move involved a change of format, from a single textile work to a book’s sequence of pages.

The speaking voice is therefore not simply an explanation pasted onto an image. Its placement can determine where a reader starts, pauses or returns. The relation between text and picture is part of the work’s construction.

Sources for this section: [2] · [4] · [5]

A later life across audiences

Ringgold taught at the University of California, San Diego, from 1984 to 2002. Alongside books for children she published the memoir We Flew Over the Bridge in 1995. She died in Englewood, New Jersey, in 2024.

The same career reached museum visitors, students and young readers through different forms. Recognising those audiences helps explain her range without treating the books as secondary merchandise or the quilts as illustrated pages.

Sources for this section: [2]