Teaching about Race and Racism Across the Disciplines

Faith Ringgold’s Life

A recent article from June 11, 2020 in the New York Times, Faith Ringgold Will Keep Fighting Back, shares an interview with Ringgold as she expresses her continued passion to make a change in the world. “I’m always thinking about what can be better,” Ms. Ringgold said about looking at life straight on while questioning it. “And if you don’t get it out there, the situation will never change.”⁴ Ringgold’s life has been filled with teaching, art, and activism. Her thoughts and voice have reached an expansive audience, through painting, murals, quilts, and several other media including masks, soft sculptures and children’s books. “I’ve got to see an idea in my head first, and I’m starting to visualize what it is I have to say.”⁵

In an autobiography she shared with Scholastic Magazine written for children as the audience, Ringgold says, “When I was a little girl growing up in Harlem, I was always encouraged to value who I was and to go after what I want. I became an artist for the same reason I became a writer - I wanted to tell my story.” ⁶

Born Faith Willi Jones in 1930, Ringgold was the youngest of three surviving children. Together with her older brother and sister, she grew up in Harlem raised by her fashion-designer mother and truck-driver father. It was the Great Depression, which meant they dealt with the economic hardships felt by many Americans. For the family, such difficulties were eased by regular visits to jazz performances during the waning years of the Harlem Renaissance. Ringgold enjoyed art from a young age; it was often her comfort and entertainment when she was bedridden with asthma as a child. It was not until after high school that she started to consider the possibility of art as a profession.

In 1948 she entered City College. Women could not enroll in the school of Liberal Arts so Ringgold majored in education with an emphasis on art. Her art training was entirely conservative and traditional: she drew from antique sculpture; studied and copied old masters of Western art; and learned lessons of perspective, light, and shadow. By 1955 she was teaching, as well as managing, a household that included her jazz-pianist husband, Robert Earl Wallace, and their two small daughters. After divorcing Wallace in 1954, Ringgold began to focus on her own artistic development.  After receiving her B.S. in Fine Art and Education in 1955, Ringgold spent the latter half of the decade juggling several different roles. While looking after her children, she taught art in the public school system and also enrolled in a graduate studies program at City College. Ringgold received her M.A. in art in 1959 and later toured Europe, visiting many of its finest museums.

“I appreciated the beauty of European art…. But I understood it wasn’t my heritage…. Most black people who are artists have the same problem. The only way you can make works of art in another person’s style is to copy…. It hampers your own development. It’s making art from art instead of art from life”

One of her professors at City College, encouraged his students to find their own aesthetic “voices,” and he supported Ringgold’s color experiments as she sought a solution to rendering dark skin tones. Ringgold remarried in 1962; her new husband, Burdette (Birdie) Ringgold, was a longtime family friend. In the summer of 1963, Ringgold began her first major series of paintings, the American People Series. Over the next four years and across 20 canvases, she created a visual record of tension-filled racial interactions and power dynamics from her own perspective as an African American woman.⁷

Early into the 1970s, Ringgold’s art took a new direction. She was deeply affected by her visit the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and its collection of Tibetan thangka paintings. Back in New York, Ringgold began to incorporate similar elements in her work, painting with acrylic on canvases with fabric borders and creating cloth dolls and soft sculptures, including Wilt, which depicted basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain. She left her teaching job in 1973 and was now free to focus more on her art. She began to pursue working in other media. She first branched out with a collection of portrait sculptures called The Harlem Series and then she created African-influenced masks that were included in performance pieces. She also made posters in support of the Black Panthers and activist Angela Davis.

And then, in 1980, came the story quilts, narrative paintings on canvas surrounded by patchwork cloth borders and turned into quilts, picking up a craft Ringgold’s great-great-great-grandmother had worked in as a slave for her masters. Her mother assisted early on.⁸ Ringgold’s first story quilt Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima? was created in 1983 as a way of publishing her unedited words.  The addition of text to Ringgold’s quilted paintings has developed into a unique medium and style all her own. “During that time, I was trying to get my autobiography published, but no one wanted to print my story. In 1983, I began writing stories on my quilts as an alternative. That way, when my quilts were hung up to look at, or photographed for a book, people could still read my stories. They are written the way I write my children's stories — each section written on the quilt is a page.” ⁹

Tar Beach, Faith Ringgold’s first children’s book, has won over 20 awards including the Caldecott Honor and the Coretta Scott King award for the best-illustrated children’s book of 1991. The original painted story quilt, Tar Beach, is in the permanent collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.