Critical artist and passionate activist Faith Ringgold dies at 93

Artist Faith Ringgold, whose seven-decade career spanned best-selling children’s books, sharp activism and a stunning array of works in mediums, has died. Massive international acclaim has long been elusive to female artists like her. Saturday at her home in Englewood, New Jersey. She is 93 years old.

Her death was announced by her longtime New York representative, ACA Gallery, but did not specify the cause.

One aspect of Ringgold’s extraordinary life would be enough to secure her place in history, but she is best known for her dynamic, richly detailed painted quilts.she is best known for tar beach (1988), tells the story of 8-year-old Cassie Louise Lightfoot as she flies off the roof of a Manhattan apartment building into the night sky. In 1991, it was adapted into a children’s book and became a staple in American elementary school classrooms.

Ringgold began using fabric as part of her practice after seeing Tibetan thangkas at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, but quilting has deep roots in her family. She said her great-great-grandmother was enslaved in the South and her great-great-grandmother sewed quilts. Her mother, Willie Posey Jones, a fashion designer, helped her sew early on, a process Ringgold would later use to document her travels, her love of art history, The Terror of the Middle Passage and more.

With a wry sense of humor and a joyful enthusiasm for invention, Ringgold also created vivid dolls and memorable political posters, staged performances, and wrote. We Fly Over the Bridge: A Memoir by Faith Ringgold Published in 1995.

She was also an organizer, picketing outside museums that excluded black and female artists and defending free speech. She was arrested at least once.Looking back at the 1960s and 1970s, when interviewed art news In 2016, Ringgold said, “People are really committed to each other, freedom, and supporting each other. I felt like I had something to say, and I wanted to say it.”

Faith Ringgold was born in New York City on October 8, 1930 and grew up in Harlem. Her father, Andrew Lewis Jones, was a truck driver. In the 1940s, she attended City College of Manhattan, and although as a woman she was prohibited from majoring in art, she was determined to become an artist, so she took classes by studying art education. After graduation, Ringgold taught art in New York public schools, resigning in the 1970s to focus on art. (She later taught for many years at the University of California, San Diego.)

From the beginning, Ringgold’s work took an unflinching look at race relations and politics in the United States. Members only (1963), from her series The American People, shows a white man staring expressionlessly. Her 1967 “Black Light” series of paintings spell out “Die N—” in the stripes of the American flag. In the 1970s, her work Slave Rape told the story of women trying to escape slavery. (They are on unstretched canvas; one of the many things she loves about working with this textile is that she can transport them herself.)

Ringgold’s vast body of work constitutes an epic, ongoing history of black life in America over the centuries and provides a window into her own experiences as an artist in a rapidly changing time. In one particularly captivating piece, she places eight pioneering black women (Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Fannie Lou Hamer) in a sunflower field in Arles, France Holding a quilt covered with sunflowers, Vincent van Gogh, the area’s most famous resident, stands by.

Ringgold performed steadily throughout her career and found supportive collectors, but major museums did not fully engage until the late 2010s and 2020s as they sought to reckon with their racist and sexist histories. “I am fully aware of the attention I am receiving in the art world right now and am grateful for it,” the artist told the outlet era 2019. “But I also know it took a long time because I had to live to be 89 to see this happen.”

In 2019, the Serpentine Gallery in London organized a critically acclaimed survey of her work, which toured to Bildmuseet in Umea, Sweden. Another retrospective exhibition is also held at the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland, and the New Museum in New York.

A few years ago, the Museum of Modern Art acquired her 12-foot-wide die (1967), showing a bloody street fight between blacks and whites.It will hang next to the legendary building when MoMA reopens after renovations in 2019 ladies of avignon She often cited the work of Pablo Picasso (1907) as a source of inspiration.

Ringgold’s art is also in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum (an institution where she picketed), and many other important institutions. She is the author of more than 16 children’s books and has received more than 20 honorary doctorates. Always ready to try new things, she even developed an app called Quiltuduko, a Sudoku-style puzzle game that involves arranging patterns and images.

The artist’s first marriage to jazz pianist Robert Earl Wallace ended in divorce. In 1962, she married autoworker Burdett “Birdie” Ringgold, who died in 2020. The artist’s survivors include her two daughters, cultural critics Michelle Wallace and Barbara Wallace.

Although Ringgold lived to see some parts of the art world embrace artists from more diverse backgrounds, she continued to be outspoken about the underrepresentation of black female artists, telling era In 2019, “There is a bias even in the selection of black women, favoring those with little or no political involvement.”

Of course, that doesn’t describe Ringgold. She stands firm in her beliefs, is prepared to take a stand, and is aware of the risks that come with it. In 1970, she participated in an exhibition called “The People’s Flag Show” at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, which was designed to challenge flag desecration laws after an art dealer had been arrested several years earlier for displaying anti-flag Convicted for his Vietnam War works. This involves the flag. The police showed up and handcuffed Ringgold and two other artists, Jean Toche and Jon Hendricks.talk with art news In 2016, she explained her thoughts on the matter. “How dare you tell artists what they can do?” she said. “That’s the beginning of some really bad fears — bad, bad, bad.”