Faith Ringgold

Lauded internationally for her narrative quilts and her colorful paintings of African American life, New York artist Faith Ringgold has explored and sabotaged perceptions of identity and gender inequality through her experiences in the feminist and civil rights movements.
This catalog is published for her international traveling exhibition organized by the Serpentine, London, which traveled to Bildmuseet, Sweden, in 2020 and opens at Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland, in 2021. Focusing on several series of paintings, story quilts and political posters from the 1960s to today, the book includes two texts by Michele Wallace that interweave Ringgold’s biography with the chronology of works in the exhibition. In an extensive interview, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ringgold discuss her life in Harlem, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, her inspirations and her passion for storytelling and exercising her freedom of speech. The book also documents the expanded scope of the exhibition at the Glenstone Museum, which includes key examples of Ringgold’s soft sculpture and rare experiments with pure abstraction.
Faith Ringgold (born 1930) is a painter, mixed-media sculptor, performance artist, teacher and writer best known for her narrative quilts. As an avid civil rights and gender equality activist, Ringgold’s work is highly political; in 2020, the New York Times described her as an artist “who has confronted race relations in this country from every angle, led protests to diversify museums decades ago, and even went to jail for an exhibition she organized.” She has had solo shows at Spectrum Gallery (1967), Studio Museum in Harlem (1984) and, most recently, a five-decade retrospective at the Serpentine (2019). Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art, among others.

Alongside reproductions of key works made between 1967 and 1981, Faith Ringgold: Politics / Power provides an overview of Ringgold's seminal artistic and activist work, and its historical context during these years, including accounts by the artist herself.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Ringgold, a dedicated and impassioned civil rights advocate, established her voice as a feminist and within the Black Arts Movement. Her influential work expressed her in-depth knowledge of art history and contemporary art, as well as her activism. Spanning mediums such as painting, cut paper works, posters, collage and textile art, the works presented in this publication foreground the artist’s explicitly political pieces, for which she deployed new material and formal processes, and developed a radical aesthetics and vocabulary.
Organized chronologically, the book allows readers to retrace the artist’s foundational creative approaches to contemporaneous social, political and artistic questions. It includes illustrations of individual artworks together with previously unpublished work and archival materials.
Faith Ringgold (born 1930) is a painter, mixed-media sculptor, performance artist, teacher and writer best known for her narrative quilts. In 2020, the New York Times described her as an artist “who has confronted race relations in this country from every angle, led protests to diversify museums decades ago, and even went to jail for an exhibition she organized.” Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art, among others. Ringgold lives and works in Englewood, New Jersey.

Unity Makes Us Stronger is a limited-edition screen print that manifests Faith Ringgold’s positions on political and social issues and serves as a powerful affirmation. Since the 1960s, Ringgold has produced distinctive graphic works that convey their powerful and significant content readily and clearly. The vivid colors and bold technique of this print emphasize the dynamic and timely nature of Ringgold’s original work.
Unity Makes Us Stronger is based on an original felt pen and crayon drawing by Ringgold from 2010, in a composition she also employed in early paintings, collages and posters such as her feminist activist works from the 1960s and 1970s. The image is composed entirely of geometric colored areas and letters designed by Ringgold, a technique she developed inspired by Kuba textile designs. In all of these works, words are shaped into eight triangular sections and face in different directions, achieving what Ringgold calls “a poly-rhythmical space,” where content and form take up the entire image.

Famed for her narrative quilts and her brightly colored paintings of African American life, New York artist Faith Ringgold (born 1930) has consistently challenged perceptions of identity and gender inequality through the lenses of the feminist and the civil rights movements.

As cultural assumptions and prejudices persist, her work retains its contemporary resonance both for observers and for fellow artists inspired by her narrative mastery and her ability to give mythical power to scenes of everyday life.

Focusing on different series that she has created over the past 50 years, this monograph portrays the breadth of her work, including paintings, story quilts and political posters made during the Black Power movement. The book also includes an interview with the artist conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist, as well as an essay written by the artist’s daughter, Michelle Wallace.

Ten adults—men and women, black and white—fight, flee or die over the twelve-foot span of American People Series #20: Die, as an interracial pair of children cowers unnoticed in their midst. While Faith Ringgold (born 1930) was devising this bloody spectacle in a Manhattan studio in the summer of 1967, civil unrest was convulsing black neighborhoods across the US. Art historian Anne Monahan's essay explores the mural's carefully orchestrated chaos and its multiform inspirations, from contemporary anxiety about black revolution, through the writings of James Baldwin and LeRoi Jones, to iconic canvases by Picasso and Pollock then on view at MoMA.