Faith Ringgold (1930–2024)

Faith Ringgold FIG.1, who died on 13th April 2024, was a Black feminist artist shaped by Harlem – a star in the constellation of the Black radical tradition. Throughout her career, Ringgold made use of anger, visualising rebellions against empires that offer wealth for the few at the expense of subjugating the masses. Using paint, mixed-media sculpture, quilting and performance, Ringgold processed a righteous rage that ultimately disrupted the visual mythology presented by the United States during the era of the Black Scare and the Red Scare. Through her visual storytelling, Ringgold showed how artists, students, workers, women and those subjected to colonialism, racial oppression and economic exploitation can subvert power – whether through direct action or by fulfilling fundamental human impulses, such as nurturing love in an environment intent on their demise.

Foundations

A daughter of the Great Migration, Faith Willi Jones was born in Harlem on 8th October 1930. In the early twentieth century, racial and sexual violence had driven Black families out of the American South, towards such enclaves as Harlem, which held out the promise of economic advancement. Ringgold’s parents, originally from Jacksonville, Florida, met as young adults in the city. Her mother, Willi Posey, named her baby Faith in the hope that she would be safe, following the loss of her son, Ralph, just nine months prior. Her father worked in the city, driving a truck for the sanitation department. As war production efforts amped up and made place for women’s labour outside of the home, her mother made parachutes and Eisenhower jackets and eventually became a celebrated dressmaker and fashion designer. The family’s four-room tenement apartment on 146th Street was Ringgold’s early studio for exploring storytelling, where she drew on both her father’s oral traditions and her mother’s work with fabric.

Willi Posey never turned anyone away who needed a place to stay. Beyond the family offering their extra bedroom, Ringgold later recalled how the wider community functioned independently of unemployment welfare and philanthropist-backed social programmes, which often turned out to be insidious systems of surveillance.¹ Such a collectivist approach to living shaped her worldview and in Harlem – which was teeming with Black life, culture and political thought – Ringgold entered into early conversations with Black intellectuals and artists. She came from a long line of educators, or ‘people who taught people’ – a lineage that encouraged her to soak up education wherever she could, even as she was often ailing from asthma and unable to attend school.² Emergent movements also served as her education. While she read James Baldwin and listened closely to Malcolm X, she realised that her contribution to the discourse was to visualise the Black American experience. She initially intended to study art, but the City College of New York (CCNY) did not allow women to major in art in the School of Liberal Arts. Instead, she earned a Bachelor’s degree in art and education in 1955, before undertaking a Master’s in Fine Arts there four years later.

Collective frustrations

From Civil Rights to Black Power, feminism and anti-war movements, artists responded to the call for radically reorganising social, political and economic structures. Yet despite their visions for a more expansive world, such movements revealed clear limitations and Ringgold often found herself pushing at the edges. One of many groups galvanised by the Civil Rights Movement was the Harlem-based Spiral collective, which was founded by Romare Bearden (1911–88), Charles Alston (1907–77), Norman Lewis (1909–79) and Hale Woodruff (1900–80). In particular, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom compelled them to determine how artists could contribute to the cause. But, for all their dedication to an art that reflected the Black struggle for dignity, their work did not acknowledge the plight of the Black woman. Emma Amos (1937–2020), who had been taught by Woodruff, was the only female member of the group.

The Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) initiated the Moratorium of Art to End the War in Vietnam, calling upon all New York museums and galleries to close their doors for a day on 15th October 1969 in solidarity with broader anti-war demonstrations. The AWC continued protesting imperialism by organising the Liberated Venice Biennale, which asked artists to boycott showing their work in the American Pavilion in 1970. However, Black and women artists were originally excluded from AWC’s counter biennale hosted in New York, prompting Ringgold, alongside fellow artist Tom Lloyd (1929–96), to support her daughters, Michele and Barbara Wallace, in founding the Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL). This exclusion of women and people of colour reflected a broader pattern in the New York art world. For example, The 1930s: Painting and Sculpture in America at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, staged in 1968, featured no women or Black artists.³ In response to these ongoing frustrations, Ringgold co-founded ‘Where We At’ Black Women Artists, Inc. (WWA) in 1971 with Dindga McCannon (b.1947), Kay Brown (1932–2012), Carol Blank, Jerri Crooks, Charlotte Richardson Ka and Gylbert Coker (b.1944), following an exhibition of the same name at Acts of Art Gallery, New York, that year. The group sought to present a Black feminist aesthetic and ethic grounded in grassroots organising.

Desecration of the American flag

Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, Ringgold worked outside of institutional confines with conviction and protested the American flag as a sacred cultural symbol. Her mural-sized painting The American People Series #18: The Flag is Bleeding FIG.2 features a Black man, a white woman and a white man, standing together with interlocked arms. They look forwards with a direct gaze as the bleeding stripes of the flag pass through each of them. The Black man holds a knife in his left hand, while his right is raised to his bleeding heart, performing a gesture that symbolises allegiance to the flag. The blood spilling from his hand, which drips down the horizontal bands, forces the viewer to contend with the contradiction of a Black man pledging himself to a nation state that is unwilling to recognise him as a full citizen.

In 1970 Ringgold, Jean Toche (1932–2018) and Jon Hendricks (b.1939) staged The People’s Flag Show at Judson Memorial Church, New York. Ringgold designed the exhibition poster FIG.3 in the form of the United States flag. She replaced the horizontal stripes with black text set against a red background:

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE THE ONLY PEOPLE
WHO CAN INTERPRET THE AMERICAN FLAG
A FLAG WHICH DOES NOT BELONG TO THE PEOPLE
TO DO WITH AS THEY SEE FIT - SHOULD BE BURNED AND FORGOTTEN - ARTISTS, WORKERS
STUDENTS, WOMEN, THIRD WORLD PEOPLES - YOU ARE OPPRESSED - WHAT DOES THE FLAG MEAN TO YOU?

JOIN THE PEOPLES ANSWER TO THE REPRESsive U.S. GOVT. + STATE LAWS RESTRICTING OUR USE + DISPLAY OF THE FLAG.

The exhibition details are included in the top left-hand corner, in place of the expected white stars. The People’s Flag Show ended with the arrest of all three artists for desecrating the American flag.

In Black Light #10: Flag for the Moon FIG.4, the artist layered the word ‘DIE’ over the stars and replaced the stripes with the racial slur ‘NIGGER’, arranged vertically. The painting directly challenged how the United States projected its image through the Apollo 11 moon landing – symbolised by Buzz Aldrin saluting the first American flag on the moon as a display of dominance and victory in the Space Race against Russia. About a year before the flag was planted on the moon’s surface, photographs of it flying on Hill 881S in Vietnam were circulated widely, portraying the Vietnam War as a struggle to defeat communism. In this work, Ringgold visualised her belief that ‘too many American people go to bed hungry, while the government spent billions to place their flag on the moon’.⁴ The ubiquity of the flag speaks to the global exportation of American culture, while Ringgold’s interpretation of it exposes its underlying contradictions.

Another major work completed during this time, American People Series #20: Die FIG.5, captures the historic moment with urgent clarity. The mural-sized painting depicts the chaos and violence that occurred during the 1960s; no one in the frame is spared from the bloodshed. The racial antagonisms after the long, hot summer of 1967 play out to full effect on the canvas. The work takes inspiration from The Migration Series (1940–41) by Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) and Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), his response to the bombing of the Basque town by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

Posters

Ringgold created a number of posters in support of Black Power and women’s liberation, all using a variable palette of red, black and green. All Power to the People FIG.6, for example, features an armed woman, man and child, representing the advocacy for self-defence from state-sanctioned violence. The text at the bottom of the work, ‘FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS’, references the state’s response to Black liberation movements with such programmes as COINTELPRO, which used deradicalisation and incarceration tactics. Designed in the same year, Committee to Defend the Panthers repeats the same two phrases and also includes the address and phone number for the Black Panther’s office: it is a direct call to action.

One of Ringgold’s most widely distributed posters, United States of Attica FIG.7, is first and foremost a visual altar to the forty-two incarcerated men who died while protesting their deplorable living conditions at Attica Correctional Facility.⁵ Across the map of the continental United States, the artist also documents the rebellions led by Black and Indigenous peoples and people of colour since the country’s inception. The names of wars and the number of lives they claimed fill the surrounding oceans. This mode of commemoration directly opposes the form and function of mainstream public memory. For example, adherents to the Lost Cause ideology erected monuments to confederate soldiers during Jim Crow, preserving a visual reminder of the master–slave relationship in the built environment. Rather than claiming a definitive commemoration and imposing it onto the landscape, Ringgold invites viewers to participate in the process of remembering, marking time and assigning meaning to what was deemed meaningless. The bottom inscription reads ‘THIS MAP OF AMERICAN VIOLENCE IS INCOMPLETE / PLEASE WRITE IN WHATEVER YOU FIND LACKING’.

Whereas The United States of Attica honoured the dead, Ringgold’s first public art commission, For the Women’s House (1971), paid tribute to the imagined futures of the women incarcerated in the Correctional Institution for Women on Rikers Island (now known as the Rose M. Singer Center). Ahead of painting the mural, she conducted interviews with the women, asking them to dream beyond the boundaries of the prison. Eight scenes reveal ambitions that were not accessible to women at that time, including doctor, bus driver and professional athlete. Throughout her career, Ringgold valued the dreams of the most dispossessed.

The story quilt

In the 1980s Ringgold transitioned from painting to quilting – a radical shift in which the artist approached the medium with the dignity and respect traditionally reserved for the fine arts. It was a Black feminist project rooted in a creative genealogy that spanned four generations: Ringgold’s mother had taught her to sew and collaborated with her on several quilts; she had learnt from her mother, Ida, who learnt from her mother, Betsy Bingham, who, in turn, was taught by her formerly enslaved mother, Susie Shannon. In laying out this lineage, Ringgold acknowledged that Shannon made quilts as part of her duties. Ringgold connected her own ancestry to a larger artistic and political economy, claiming that ‘undoubtedly many of the early American quilts with repetitive geometric designs [were] slave made and African influenced’.⁶ In other words, the craft that was seen as the height of femininity was deeply entwined with the stolen labour of enslavement. Another tradition that she engaged with was oral folklore, which she learned from her father, the family storyteller. As such, these painted quilts and their narratives do not obscure Black women’s experiences, but rather give them prominence.

Ringgold’s first quilt collaboration with her mother was Echoes of Harlem (1980); Willi Posey died in 1981, so it was also their last work together. Three years later, Ringgold produced Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima? FIG.8, which flipped the ‘mammy’ stereotype – the loyal and eager-to-serve Black woman – on its head. In Ringgold’s narrative, the fictional character Jemima Blakely is descended from people who liberated themselves in New Orleans. Blakely and her husband own and operate a successful restaurant and catering business in Harlem. This work also provides an insight into how different generations approach Black feminism. Ringgold’s daughter Michele did not view Jemima as the feminist hero that her mother, and other women of her generation, believed that she could be. In an effort to redeem the Aunt Jemima archetype, Ringgold fell into tropes of respectability politics, creating a character who is legible to white middle-class society.

Enclosed by a red border, the Slave Rape Story Quilt FIG.9 comprises tie-dyed squares – made by the textile artist Marquetta Johnson (1955–2024) – and text in the form of a cross. In the centre, the story is interrupted by a chaos of bodies in the hold of a slave ship named the Carriolle. The narrator, Beata, describes her own violent birth aboard the ship while en route to South Carolina. A drunken sailor attempts to touch Beata, but her mother, ‘with her last gust of strength’, throws herself and the slaveholder into the ocean; ‘that was on March 22, 1846’. The child born of rape ends up becoming a healer, learning the art of roots and tea. She builds a shrine of stones and flowers for her mother, a practice that echoes Ringgold’s own commitment to honouring Black ancestors, especially those who gave their lives fighting against oppression. Although Beata faces the same sexual violence as her mother, she and her daughter, Rebecca, eventually earn their freedom. The story encourages the viewer to contemplate the meaning of individual freedom in the afterlife of slavery, where Beata faces a precarious existence not fundamentally different to that of her mother.

A legacy: visualising ‘the mindset of the rebellious field slave’

In 1985 Amiri Baraka (1934–2014), the founder of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre, New York, contextualised Ringgold’s work within the larger Black Arts Movement. He declared that:

she has elaborated the art of the Field (the widest range, the unkept slaves’ open-air studio, where the research is, etc., not the way the house slave might, from an unblinded window, see down, and just off, the small figures of the field slaves breakdancin' with that cotton) […] The sight, the sound, the breathing, the blood, the mindset of the rebellious field slave.⁷

He articulated not only what he understood to be Ringgold’s artistic perspective, but also her political commitment to making art that visualised a history from below as opposed to a history from the tower, detached from everyday people. Ringgold’s sojourn through rage transformed twentieth-century art, even as it did its best to keep her out. Following a panel in Harlem, with Woodruff, Lewis, Bearden, Betty Blayton (1937–2016) and others Ringgold asked: ‘why are we all being so nice?’. She continued: ‘I think a lot of people thought, “Why don't you just be quiet? If we are quiet and we act nice, we may get something”’.⁸ Her penchant to openly and loudly share the challenges she faced due to anti-Blackness and sexism made her unpopular with Black accommodationists, but it was this agitator spirit that distinguished her career.