Faith Ringgold

Faith Willi Jones Ringgold was born on the eighth of October 1930 at Harlem, the youngest of three children of Andrew Louis Jones Sr. — a sanitation truck driver of the New York City Department of Sanitation — and Willi Posey Jones, a fashion designer of the Harlem Renaissance period who had completed a course at the Fashion Institute of Technology at New York in 1947.

She was raised in the closing-period Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s at 363 Edgecombe Avenue — Sugar Hill — in the same Edgecombe building that housed at the same period the painter Aaron Douglas (placed in this archive), the writer W.E.B. Du Bois (placed in this archive), and the singer Paul Robeson (placed in this archive). She was tutored privately at the Edgecombe building across her childhood by Douglas on Saturday afternoons.

She took the bachelor of arts in art at the City College of New York in 1955 — the City College art department then under the painters Robert Gwathmey and the post-Albers colour-theorist Yasuo Kuniyoshi — and the master of arts in art education at the same institution in 1959.

She taught art across the closing years of the 1950s and the 1960s at the Harlem public schools — predominantly at the John W. Mason High School at 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue — and at the same time produced from her Harlem studio at 345 West 145th Street the principal series of paintings of the early career.

She completed in 1967 the principal early painting cycle of her career — the American People series of twenty oil-on-canvas works on the racial conditions of the period — including the principal large painting Die (1967), a six-by-twelve-foot oil canvas on the urban racial violence of the period, modelled on Picasso’s Guernica.

She completed across the closing years of the 1970s the principal transition of her pictorial career — from the oil-painting on stretched canvas of the 1960s to the painted-narrative quilt that would become her principal mature form. The first painted-narrative quilt was Echoes of Harlem (1980), made in collaboration with her mother Willi Posey at the Posey-Jones household at New York.

She published in 1991 the children’s book Tar Beach — adapted from the 1988 painted quilt of the same title in the principal Story Quilt series — which was awarded the 1991 Coretta Scott King Award and the 1992 Caldecott Honor.

She was given a thirty-year career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art at New York on the third of June 1989 — the first solo exhibition of an African American woman at the institution. The exhibition Faith Ringgold: Twenty Years of Painting, Sculpture and Performance opened in the spring 1989 and travelled across the following two years to the Castle Center at College Park, Maryland, the Whitney Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Pacific Asia Museum at Pasadena.

She founded in 1999 at New York the Anyone Can Fly Foundation — a non-profit dedicated to expanding the children’s knowledge of African American art — and directed it through 2020.

She died at Englewood, New Jersey on the thirteenth of April 2024 of natural causes, at ninety-three.

She is honored here as the first Black woman at MoMA.