Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold was born in 1930 in Harlem to a working class family. She began to study art and education at the City College in New York in 1948. She is well known for her painted story quilts, which blur the line between "high art" and "craft" by combining painting, quilted fabric, and storytelling. She was 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. 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 1963 she had her first solo exhibition with The American People Series. Heavy outlines and flat spaces of dark or saturated color were becoming Ringgold’s recognizable style in her paintings and what she termed as “super-realism.” Her paintings in this series were highly political and included images of social satire and confronted the racial tensions of the time and issues of tokenism associated with integration and the efforts of African Americans to “assimilate” into white society. Ringgold said that her objective with the series “was to make a statement about the Civil Rights movement and what was happening to black people at the time.” In her paintings The Flag is Bleeding, Die and U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Advent of Black Power she portrays the shift from nonviolent civil rights advocacy to the violent confrontations that began to occur in the late 60s.
Ringgold continued to be political and social active and her work reflected her involvement. In 1970 she completed The Black Light Series that contained controversial images and text. In her painting Flag for the Moon, she comments expresses her anger over the billions of dollars spent to put a man on the moon while millions of Americans continue to live in poverty. Also, she comments on and questions the image of the American flag as a symbol of freedom and justice.
In 1972, during a visit to Amsterdam Ringgold observed a collection of Tibetan Buddhist paintings that were rendered on silk and hung on wooden dowels called thangkas. Ringgold adapted similar techniques within her own work. Also, as a child, she was taught to sew fabrics by her mother and drew upon the African American quilt-making tradition. Quilts in the African American slave community served various purposes: warmth, preserving memories and events, storytelling, and even as "message boards" for the Underground Railroad to guide slaves on their way north to freedom. Some techniques common to African-American quilts included patchwork and appliqué.
Through her work on fabric Ringgold confronted personal issues such as the death of her mother, her childhood in Harlem and her identity as an African American woman. She also incorporated handwritten text into her story quilts to create narratives dealing with themes of race and gender, such as, Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima? where she explores the Aunt Jemima or “mammy” image in American popular culture and the French Collection, where she explores the race and gender within art history, particularly in Modern art.
Questions/issues to think about
Ringgold uses provocative language/imagery and depicts violence in her work – relating to the work and issues of Kara Walker – does this perpetuate negative stereotypes or criticize/critique?

How does the medium (particularly cloth/quilting) that Ringgold works with affect her narratives she creates?