Faith Ringgold is an African American artist, best known for her painted story quilts. She is professor emeritus in the University of California, San Diego visual art department.
Faith Ringgold was born on October 8, 1930 and raised in Harlem and educated at the City College of New York, where she studied with Robert Gathmey and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. She received an M.A.from the college in 1959. She was greatly influenced by the fabric she worked with at home with her mother, who was a fashion designer, and has used fabric in many of her artworks. She is especially well known for her painted story quilts which blur the line between “high art” and “craft” by combining painting, quilted fabric, and storytelling.
She modeled her “story quilts” on the Buddhist Thangkas, lovely pictures painted on fabric and quilted or brocaded, which could then be easily rolled up and transported. She has influenced numerous modern artists, including Linda Freeman, and known some of the greatest African American artists personally, including Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Betye Saar.
Her work is in the permanent collection of many museums including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and other museums, mostly in New York City. In addition, Ringgold has written and illustrated seventeen children’s books. Her first book, Tar Beach, won the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration and the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award.
Ringgold has been an activist since the 1970s, participating in several feminist, anti-racist organizations. In 1970, Ringgold, fellow artist Poppy Johnson, and art critic Lucy Lippard, founded the Ad Hoc Women’s Art Committee and protested the Whitney Annual, a major art exhibition held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Members of the committee demanded that women artists account for fifty percent of the exhibitors and created disturbances at the museum by leaving raw eggs and sanitary napkins on its grounds and by gathering to sing, blow whistles, and chant about their exclusion. That same year, Ringgold and her daughter, the writer Michele Wallace, founded Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL). Around 1974, Ringgold and Wallace were founding members of the National Black Feminist Organization. Ringgold was also a founding member of the “Where We At” Black Women Artists, a New York-based women art collective associated with the Black Arts Movement.
On January 16, 2012 for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, she had a Google Doodle featured on Google’s home page.
***Information courtesy of Wikipedia.org***