Faith Ringgold, the versatile artist who explored race and identity through her multimedia work, died on Saturday at her New Jersey home, her daughter told The New York Times. The artist was 93 years old.
Ringgold gained acclaim for her richly woven decorative quilts, which often vibrantly depicted the ordinary life of Black women. A classically trained painter and sculptor, she also worked across a variety of other media, often fusing her art and activism with political works that captured racial tensions in the 1960s and 1970s. She also protested with others who wanted elite art institutions to feature more Black and women artists, and was a vocal critic of museums that left them out.
“In a world where having the power to express oneself or to do something is limited to a very few, art appeared to me to be an area where anyone could do that,” she told the Orlando Sentinel in 1992.
Ringgold adapted one of her most celebrated designs, the 1988 “Tar Beach” story quilt, into a Caldecott Award-winning children’s picture book, which marked the beginning of her career as a storybook illustrator. In this second venture, she continued to focus on Black women’s stories and histories, creating artwork and text for picture books about icons like Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman for children.
Harlem-born Ringgold was surrounded by prominent Black artists from a young age, and counted figures like James Baldwin and staples like jazz music among her creative influences. Born in 1930, Ringgold’s childhood neighbors include Duke Ellington and Dinah Washington, and she earned two degrees in art from the City College of New York in her 20s. In 1990, she described breaking out of a Eurocentric standard of art and establishing her own style.
“We copied Greek busts, we copied Degas, we copied everything,” she said, “It was generally thought that we weren’t experienced enough to be original, and if we were original we were sometimes up for ridicule.”
Ringgold’s work is held in some of the world’s finest art collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim. She exhibited all over the world, including at the White House, and was on the faculty of schools ranging from the University of California, San Diego to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
Her breakout work, “Die,” is in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art—the same institution at which she once protested for more inclusion of women artists.
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