About the Artist
Faith Ringgold
Faith Ringgold (b. 1930 - ) is an artist from Harlem, New York City best known for her narrative quilts. Coming of age after the Harlem Renaissance, Ringgold was exposed to creativity from an early age. Ringgold’s future artwork was greatly affected by the people, poetry, and music she experienced in her childhood, as well as the racism, sexism, and segregation she dealt with in her everyday life. Ringgold’s artistic practice was extremely broad and diverse, and included media from painting to quilts, from sculptures and performance art to children’s books. She was an educator who taught in the NYC Public school system and on the college level. In 1973, she began to create fulltime. Ringgold began her painting career in the 1950s. She took inspiration from the writings of James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka, African art, Impressionism, and Cubism to create the works she made in the 1960s. Her early work is composed with flat figures and shapes. Though she received a great deal of attention with these images, galleries and collectors were uncomfortable with them and she sold very little work. This is because many of her early paintings focused on the underlying racism in everyday activities. These works were also politically based and reflected her experiences growing up during the Harlem Renaissance and grew into maturity during the Civil Rights Movement and Women’s movement.
