Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold was born Faith Willi Jones in Harlem on the eighth of October 1930 and raised on Sugar Hill's Edgecombe Avenue, where Aaron Douglas and Du Bois were neighborhood presences and Sonny Rollins a childhood friend. Asthma kept her often home, where her mother — the fashion designer Willi Posey — put drawing and needle both into her hands. City College would not admit women to its liberal-arts program, so she entered through the education school and took her degrees in art regardless — bachelor's 1955, master's 1959, studying under Robert Gwathmey — then taught in the city's public schools for eighteen years.

The American People Series (1963-67) said what polite painting would not, and its twentieth canvas — Die, a six-by-twelve-foot Guernica of American riot — now hangs at the Museum of Modern Art, acquired in 2016, near Picasso's Demoiselles. She never had a MoMA solo show; she picketed the place instead, co-founding the Ad Hoc Women's Art Committee against the Whitney and marching on the Modern, and in November 1970, for the People's Flag Show at Judson Memorial Church, she was arrested as one of the Judson Three for flag desecration — fined a hundred dollars, defended with the ACLU, the penalty undone on appeal.

In the seventies she loosed her art from the stretcher — thangka-inspired fabric frames, masks, soft sculpture, the Rikers Island mural For the Women's House — and in 1980, with her mother's needle beside her, made her first quilt, Echoes of Harlem. The story quilts became her signature: Tar Beach (1988) flew into the Guggenheim's collection, its heroine lifting off a Harlem rooftop, and the children's book of it (1991) took a Caldecott Honor and the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award. The French Collection quilts sent Willia Marie Simone through modernism's Paris to talk back to it. She professed at UC San Diego from 1987 to 2002 and founded the Anyone Can Fly Foundation.

She died at her Englewood, New Jersey, home on the thirteenth of April 2024, at ninety-three — the museums she had picketed long since holding her among their treasures. Honored be Faith Ringgold, who quilted the sky open so the children could fly through.