Faith Ringgold, who wove Black life into quilts and children’s books, 93
Faith Ringgold, a multimedia artist whose pictorial quilts depicting the African American experience gave rise to a second distinguished career as a writer and illustrator of children’s books, died Saturday at her home in Englewood, N.J. She was 93.
Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Barbara Wallace.
For more than a half-century, Ms. Ringgold explored themes of race, gender, class, family, and community through a vast array of media, among them painting, sculpture, mask- and dollmaking, textiles, and performance art. She was also a longtime advocate of bringing the work of Black people and women into the collections of major American museums.
Ms. Ringgold’s art has been exhibited at the White House and in museums and galleries around the world. It is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and other institutions.
“Freedom to Say What I Please,” a partial retrospective of her work, was exhibited at the Worcester Art Museum earlier this year.
For Ms. Ringgold, as her work and many interviews made plain, art and activism were a seamless, if sometimes quilted, whole. Classically trained as a painter and sculptor, she began producing political paintings in the 1960s and ’70s that explored the highly charged subjects of relations between Black and white people, and between men and women, in America.
“Few artists have kept as many balls in the air as long as Faith Ringgold,” New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote in 2013, reviewing an exhibition in Manhattan. “She has spent more than five decades juggling message and form, high and low, art and craft, inspirational narrative, and quiet or not so quiet fury about racial and sexual inequality.”
The hallmarks of Ms. Ringgold’s style included the integration of craft materials including fabric, beads, and thread with fine-art materials like paint and canvas; vibrant, saturated colors; a flattened perspective that deliberately evoked the work of naive painters; and a keen, often tender focus on ordinary Black people and the visual minutiae of their daily lives.
Ms. Ringgold ultimately became best known for what she called “story quilts”: large panels of unstretched canvas, painted with narrative scenes in vivid acrylics, framed by quasitraditional borders of pieced fabric and often incorporating written text. The quilts tell of the joys and rigors of Black lives — and, in particular, of Black women’s lives — while simultaneously celebrating the human capacity to transcend circumstance through the art of dreaming.
One of her most celebrated story quilts, “Tar Beach,” completed in 1988, gave rise to her first children’s book, published three years later under the same title. With text and original paintings by Ms. Ringgold, the book, like the quilt, depicts a Black family convivially picnicking and slumbering on the roof of their Harlem apartment building on a summer’s night.
“Tar Beach” was named a Caldecott Honor Book by the American Library Association. It has endured as a childhood staple.
Ms. Ringgold went on to illustrate more than a dozen picture books, most with her own text, including “Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky” (1992), about Harriet Tubman, and “If a Bus Could Talk: The Story of Rosa Parks” (1999).
Her eminence in the field is all the more striking in that she never set out to be a children’s author.
The youngest child of Andrew Louis Jones and Willi (Posey) Jones, Faith Willi Jones was born in Harlem on Oct. 8, 1930. Her father, a sanitation truck driver, left the family when Faith was about 2, although he remained in close contact.
Faith’s mother, who worked as a seamstress, later became a fashion designer with her own label, Mme. Willi Posey, and an atelier in Harlem. She was so successful that she was able to move with her children to Sugar Hill, the exclusive Harlem enclave whose residents also included Duke Ellington and Thurgood Marshall.
“We all lived together, so it wasn’t a surprise to see these people rolling up in their limos,” Ms. Ringgold said. “And that said to us, you can do this, too.”
An asthmatic child, Faith was often kept home in bed, where she passed the time drawing and painting. Her father brought her her first easel, salvaged from his trash collection rounds.
Theirs was a storytelling family, and as an adult, Ms. Ringgold recalled with particular pleasure the narrative gifts of her elder brother, Andrew.
“We went to the movies at a time when there were already great stories, but they didn’t have any Black people in them — or if they did, you didn’t like the way the characters were,” she said in an interview for the NPR program “All Things Considered” in 1999. “So my brother would come home and he would rewrite everything.”
One day in the 1940s, when Andrew was a teenager, he was dispatched on an errand for their mother to a white neighborhood in Manhattan. There, a gang of white youths surrounded him and beat him nearly to death. He was refused treatment at a hospital. He recovered but was never the same, Ms. Ringgold said. He became addicted to drugs and died of an overdose in 1961.
At about 20, Ms. Ringgold eloped with a childhood sweetheart, Robert Earl Wallace, and had two daughters in quick succession. But she soon discovered that her husband, a classical and jazz pianist, was a drug addict; they separated in 1954 and divorced two years later. (Wallace also died of an overdose, in 1961.)
Ms. Ringgold earned a bachelor’s degree in art and education from the City College of New York in 1955 and a master’s in art there in 1959. In 1962, she married Burdette Ringgold.
From 1955 to 1973, Ms. Ringgold taught art in the New York City school system, in Harlem and the Bronx, while trying to establish a career as a painter.
Little by little, she cast about for an aesthetic that reflected her own life and times. By the 1960s, influenced by the writings of James Baldwin and LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), along with the rich visual polyphony of African art and the rhythms of the jazz she had heard and loved as a child, she had found it.
Her work from this period includes the “Black Light” series, a set of portraits in which she depicted her African American subjects using a specially conceived palette of rich dark colors.
It also includes a 1967 painting, “American People Series #20: Die,” which was a professional watershed. Twelve feet long, the canvas depicts a violent profusion of men, women, and children — Black and white, some wielding weapons, most spattered with blood — whose roiling tangle recalls Pablo Picasso’s 1937 masterpiece, “Guernica.”
“Die” became the centerpiece of her first solo exhibition, held that year at Spectrum Gallery in New York. The show helped her stake her claim as a significant American artist.
In 1968, Ms. Ringgold helped organize a protest by Black artists, long marginalized by the art establishment, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Two years later she took part in a protest at the Museum of Modern Art centering on female artists.
“Today, some 25 years later,” she wrote in 1995, “nothing much has changed at the Modern except which white man gets the next show.”
The word “man” was telling, for Ms. Ringgold had long since come to believe that her efforts on behalf of Black artists were of little avail to those who also happened to be female. By the 1970s, she was producing more overtly feminist work.
Collaborating with her mother, Ms. Ringgold made her first full quilt, “Echoes of Harlem,” a montage of painted Black faces and pieced fabric, in 1980.
“I think of quilts as the classic art form of Black people in America,” Ms. Ringgold told The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa., in 2005. “When African slaves came to America, they couldn’t do their sculpture anymore. They were divorced from their religion. So they would take scraps of fabric and make them into coverlets for the master and for themselves.”
In 1983, frustrated at her inability to find a publisher for a memoir she had written, Ms. Ringgold began incorporating narrative text into her quilts. Few artists of the period were doing anything of the kind.
The first of her story quilts, “Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?” reimagined the original stereotyped figure — the fat, frumpy Black woman, drawn straight from a minstrel show. On Ms. Ringgold’s quilt, Jemima has been transformed into a feminist role model: a trim, elegant, and successful entrepreneur.
In 1999, she established the Anyone Can Fly Foundation, which promotes the work of artists of the African diaspora from the 18th century onward.
In addition to her daughter Barbara, a linguist, Ms. Ringgold leaves another daughter, Michele Wallace, a feminist writer; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Her husband, Burdette, died in 2020.
In 2022, she received a major retrospective at the New Museum in Manhattan. The show, which filled three floors, “makes clear that what consigned Ringgold to an outlier track half a century ago puts her front and center now,” Holland Cotter wrote in his review in the Times.