48 Facts About Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold was an art teacher in the New York City public school system.

Faith Ringgold wrote and illustrated over a dozen children's books.

Faith Ringgold's art has been exhibited throughout the world and is in the permanent collections of The Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Faith Ringgold Willi Jones was born the youngest of three children on October 8,1930, in Harlem Hospital, New York City.

Faith Ringgold's mother was a fashion designer and her father, as well as working a range of jobs, was an avid storyteller.

Faith Ringgold learned how to sew and work creatively with fabric from her mother.

In 1948, due to pressure from her family, Faith Ringgold enrolled at the City College of New York to major in art, but was forced to major in art education instead, as City College only allowed women to be enrolled in certain majors.

Faith Ringgold was introduced to printmaker Robert Blackburn, with whom she would collaborate on a series of prints 30 years later.

In 1955, Faith Ringgold received her bachelor's degree from City College and soon afterward taught in the New York City public school system.

Faith Ringgold visited West Africa twice: once in 1976 and again in 1977.

Faith Ringgold began her painting career in the 1950s after receiving her degree.

Faith Ringgold was inspired by the writings of James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka, African art, Impressionism, and Cubism to create the works she made in the 1960s.

In 1972, as part of a commission sponsored by the Creative Artists Public Service Program, Faith Ringgold installed For the Women's House in the Women's Facility on Rikers Island.

Around the opening of her show for American People, Faith Ringgold worked on her collection called America Black, in which she experimented with darker colors.

Faith Ringgold sent a couple of representatives to buy a piece, and they realized, only after the artist suggested they actually read the text on her work, that the stars and stripes of the American flag as depicted optically incorporated the phrase "DIE NIGGER".

Faith Ringgold stated she switched from painting to fabric to get away from the association of painting with Western European traditions.

In 1972, Faith Ringgold travelled to Europe in the summer of 1972 with her daughter Michele.

Faith Ringgold's mother, Willi Posey, collaborated with her on this project, as Posey was a popular Harlem clothing designer and seamstress during the 1950s and taught Ringgold how to quilt in the African-American tradition.

Faith Ringgold was taught the art of quilting in an African-American style by her grandmother, who had in turn learned it from her mother, Susie Shannon, who was a slave.

Faith Ringgold followed The French Collection with The American Collection, a series of quilts that continues the narrative from The French Collection.

In 1973, Faith Ringgold began experimenting with sculpture as a new medium to document her local community and national events.

Faith Ringgold began making mixed-media costumed masks after hearing her students express their surprise that she did not already include masks in her artistic practice.

Faith Ringgold eventually made a series of eleven mask costumes, called the Witch Mask Series, in a second collaboration with her mother.

Faith Ringgold later began making dolls with painted gourd heads and costumes.

Faith Ringgold began with Wilt as a response to some negative comments that Chamberlain made about African-American women in his autobiography.

Faith Ringgold did this by covering the faces in cloth, molding them carefully to preserve the likeness.

Faith Ringgold later moved on to produce many other performance pieces including a solo autobiographical performance piece called Being My Own Woman: An Autobiographical Masked Performance Piece, a masked story performance set during the Harlem Renaissance called The Bitter Nest, and a piece to celebrate her weight loss called Change: Faith Ringgold's Over 100 Pound Weight Loss Performance Story Quilt.

Many of these performances were interactive, as Faith Ringgold encouraged her audience to sing and dance with her.

Faith Ringgold described in her autobiography, We Flew Over the Bridge, that her performance pieces were not meant to shock, confuse or anger, but rather "simply another way to tell my story".

Faith Ringgold's first was Tar Beach, published by Crown in 1991, based on her quilt story of the same name.

Faith Ringgold was the runner-up for the Caldecott Medal, the premier American Library Association award for picture book illustration.

Faith Ringgold was an activist during much of her life, participating in several feminist and anti-racist organizations.

In 1968, fellow artist Poppy Johnson, and art critic Lucy Lippard, founded the Ad Hoc Women's Art Committee with Faith Ringgold and protested a major modernist art exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Faith Ringgold was a founding member of the "Where We At" Black Women Artists, a New York-based women's art collective associated with the Black Arts Movement.

Faith Ringgold spoke about black representation in the arts in 2004, saying:.

In 1988, Faith Ringgold co-founded the Coast-to-Coast National Women Artists of Color Projects with Clarissa Sligh.

Faith Ringgold wrote the catalog introduction titled "History of Coast to Coast".

In 1987, Faith Ringgold accepted a teaching position in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego.

Faith Ringgold continued to teach until 2002, when she retired.

In 1995, Faith Ringgold published her first autobiography, We Flew Over the Bridge.

Faith Ringgold received over 80 awards and honors and 23 honorary doctorates.

Faith Ringgold resided with her second husband Burdette "Birdie" Faith Ringgold, whom she married in 1962, in a home in Englewood, New Jersey, where she lived and maintained a steady studio practice from 1992.

Faith Ringgold died at her home in Englewood, New Jersey, on April 13,2024, at age 93.

Black Entertainment Television had aired several episodes of the television series Roc in which a Faith Ringgold poster was shown on nine occasions for a total of 26.75 seconds.

Faith Ringgold wanted the opening to not be "another all white" opening but a "refined black art affair".

In 2019, a major retrospective of Faith Ringgold's work was mounted by London's Serpentine Galleries, from June 6 until September 8.

In 2020, Faith Ringgold's work was featured in Polyphonic: Celebrating PAMM's Fund for African American Art, a group show at Perez Art Museum Miami highlighting artists in the museum collection acquired through the PAMM Fund for African American Art, an initiative created in 2013.

Faith Ringgold was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.