Faith Ringgold is the Harlem born African American artist who is currently featured in the main gallery at Potomac’s Glenstone Museum with 70 of her works from collections from around the world. Included are paintings, story quilts, political posters, and nine works from Glenstone’s own collection.
Faith Willi Jones was born in 1930 to a storytelling minister, Andrew Lewis Jones, and fashion designer Willi Posey Jones (Madame Posey) during the Harlem renaissance. In the 1940’s her family moved to Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem’s prestigious Sugar Hill neighborhood. As a child with asthma and allergies, she found her refuge in art.
She observed the comings and goings of her Edgecombe neighbors and role models, the pantheon of Black politics and cultural creativity, including jurists Thurgood Marshall and Eunice Carter, musicians Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Chick Webb, Cassandra Wilson, and Kenneth Clark; artists Aaron Douglas and Elizabeth Catlett; writers W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and Countee Cullen; pioneering physician May Chinn; poets William Braithwaite and Jessie Redmon Fauset; actors Julius Bledsoe and Paul Robeson; activists Walter White and Roy Wilkins; radical communist journalist Marvel Cooke; and world heavy-weight champion Joe Louis. Her childhood friend was the jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins.
After her graduation from City College in 1955, Ringgold began teaching in the New York City public school system. She earned her master’s degree in art from City College in 1959 and began her primary career outside of teaching–as a painter, though she continued in her teaching position until 1973. Most of her first canvases were landscapes, but her art was profoundly influenced by her Summer travels in Europe and Africa in the early 1960’s.
She had her first two one-person exhibitions at the Spectrum Gallery in New York. She made African-inspired soft sculptures and masks; and Tibetan-inspired Tankas, paintings framed with brocade borders. In 1980 she collaborated with her mother on her first quilt, Echoes of Harlem, an evolution of her tankas.
She created her first political paintings, The American People Series from 1963 to 1967 which made direct reference to the race riots of the time. In 1972 she was arrested for exhibiting one painting from that series, “The Flag is Bleeding” (1967). The charges of desecrating the flag were eventually dropped in 1974.
In 1983 Ringgold created a unique medium by publishing her unedited words on her first story quilt “Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?“ Literally speaking for themselves, the story quilts incorporate written narratives into vibrant collages of fabric. Ringgold paints images and accompanying text directly onto the fabric, making the quilt her canvas. “The story quilts grew out of my need to tell stories not with pictures or symbols alone, but with words,” said the artist.
Ringgold has written and illustrated 22 books including 3 children’s books and an autobiography and was involved in building a Harlem legacy, the Faith Ringgold Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling, part of a community development project on West 155th Street.
Faith Ringgold is Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of California in San Diego and has received 23 Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees. She is the recipient of more than 80 awards.
This exhibition debuted at the Serpentine Gallery in London. It was on view at the Bildmuseet in Sweden. After delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the extensive exhibit including 30 additional works opened at the only U.S. venue, Glenstone Museum, in August 2021 and will close on October 24th.