Life In Brief

AMERICAN AUTHOR AND ARTIST

Faith Ringgold, an award-winning American author and painter who broke down barriers for black female artists and became famous for her richly coloured and detailed quilts combining painting, textiles and storytelling, has died. She was 93.

Ringgold’s rise to prominence was not easy in an art world dominated by white males and in a political cultural one in which black men were the leading voices for civil rights.

As a founder of the Where We At art collective for black women in 1971, Ringgold became a social activist, frequently protesting about the lack of representation of black and female artists in US museums.

“I became a feminist out of disgust for the manner in which women were marginalised in the art world,” she told The New York Times in 2019. “I began to incorporate 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 takes flight over the George Washington Bridge. The story symbolised women’s self-realisation and freedom to confront “this huge masculine icon

– the bridge”, she explained.

The story is based on her narrative quilt of the same name now in the permanent collection of the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York.

While her works often deal with issues of race and gender, their folklike style is vibrant, optimistic and lighthearted and often reminiscent of her warm memories of her life in her home neighbourhood of Harlem.

Ringgold introduced quilting into her work in the 1970s after seeing brocaded Tibetan thangka paintings. They inspired her to create patchwork fabric borders, or frames, with handwritten narrative around her canvas acrylic paintings.

For her 1982 story quilt, Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemina, Ringgold confronted the struggles of women by undermining the black “mammy” stereotype and telling the story of a successful African-American businesswoman called Jemima Blakey.

Soon afterwards Ringgold produced a series of 12 quilt paintings titled

The French Collection, again weaving narrative, biographical and AfricanAmerican cultural references and Western art. One 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 its walls.

Born in Harlem, Ringgold was one of three children of Andrew Lewis Jones and Willi Posey, a seamstress and dress designer with whom she collaborated often. She attended City College of New York and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art. She taught in schools until 1973 and was a professor of art at the University of California in San Diego from 1987 to 2002.

Ringgold married Robert Earl Wallace, a pianist, in 1950. They divorced in 1956 after having two daughters. In 1962 she married Burdette Ringgold, who predeceased her. She is survived by her daughters.

Born 8 October 1930 Died 12 April 2024