Faith Ringgold

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Faith Ringgold (born Faith Will Jones on October 8, 1930 in New York City ) is an African American artist. She has created paintings devoted to civil rights issues and is known for her narrative quilts .

Life

She grew up as Faith Will Jones in Harlem, New York, the youngest of four children. The culture of the Harlem Renaissance played a central role in her childhood home. Having suffered from asthma as a child , she spent a lot of time at home with her mother, a fashion designer who designed for black women in Harlem. From her she learned to sew and how to work creatively with fabric.

From 1950 she studied art education at the City College of New York after she had been rejected for the subject of fine arts . In the same year she married the jazz musician Robert Earl Wallace and gave birth to two daughters. She separated from him in 1954, raised the children alone and worked as an art teacher in public schools. She completed her studies in 1959 with a master's degree . In 1962 she married Burdette Ringgold.

She became politically active in the late 1960s. She protested against the marginalization of black and women artists by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1971 she co-founded the group Where We At, a group of African American women artists.

In 1973 she gave up her profession as a teacher and devoted herself only to her art. From 1984 to 2002 she was a professor at the University of California at San Diego. She now lives and works in La Jolla , California , and Englewood, New Jersey . One of her daughters is the author Michele Wallace .

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With a series of oil paintings and posters from the late 1960s onwards, she conveyed anti-racist messages. In the American People series , she portrayed icons of the civil rights movement from a female perspective. Works such as Neighbors , Die , The Flag Is Bleeding and The Harlem Series reflect the issues and debates of this time. Her first solo exhibition in 1967 was dedicated to this series. One of her main works, the depiction of the bloody race riots in Detroit in 1967 , now hangs in the New York Museum of Modern Art next to Picasso's painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon from 1907. In the 1970s she created African-style masks and painted political posters in support by Angela Davis or the Black Panther .

During a visit to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam , she was so impressed by the collection of Tibetan thangka paintings that upon her return she began to incorporate similar elements into her work. The portable scroll paintings inspired her to design narrative quilts from the 1980s onwards , which quickly gained notoriety. Her first quilt, Echoes of Harlem , was dedicated to her mother. With the quilt Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima? (1983) she began to combine pictures and handwritten text into a story. Women on a Bridge (1988) is a series of colorful quilts that tell the stories of women flying over bridges in the urban night sky. The motif means liberation for ring gold. Ringgold's use of artisanal techniques ignores the traditional distinction between fine arts and handicrafts .

Ringgold made several trips to France with her mother and daughters to explore the art of European masters. The French Collection, 1991-1994 , a series of twelve quilts, tells of the absence of African American women in the art world.

In the 1990s she also presented herself as an author of literature for children and has since written and illustrated 15 children's books.

Awards

  • 1984: John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship Candace Award
  • 1992: Caldecott Medal
  • 1994: Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award
  • 2000: NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work
  • 2017: Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Publications (selection)

Autobiography
  • We flew over the bridge. The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold , Duke University Presse, 2005, ISBN 978-0-8223-3564-1

literature

  • Kari Herbert: Rebel Artists: 15 female painters who showed it to the world. 2nd edition, CH Beck, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-406-74147-0 , pp. 98-105 (= Faith Ringgold, USA: Stitched History , pp. 98-105).

Web links

Commons : Faith Ringgold  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files
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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Siddhartha Mitter: Revolutionary Sisters: Artwork Forged in the Crucible of Battles Over Feminism , in: The Village Voice , March 29, 2017
  2. ↑ New York Times : MoMA Reboots With 'Modernism Plus' , October 10, 2019
  3. ↑ Nancy Spector: Faith Ringgold Woman on a Bridge # 1 of 5: Tar Beach , in: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Collection online
  4. ↑ Michele Wallace: The French Connection. Momma Jones, Mammy Faith and Me . In: Dancing at the Louvre. Faith Ringgold's French Collection and Other Story Quilts , University of California Press 1998, ISBN 978-0-520-21430-9 , p. 14 ff.
  5. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter R. (PDF; 508 kB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Accessed December 30, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Ringgold, Faith
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Jones, Faith Will (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American artist
DATE OF BIRTH October 8, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Harlem