Have Faith: colourful and carefully constructed, these quilts communicate eloquently
In remembrance of Faith Ringgold who died on 12 April 2024, we look back at an article about her work in Selvedge issue 04: Celebrate.
Text by Dr. Catherine Harper
Faith Ringgold’s website – www.faithringgold.com – states “if you are an artist, writer, teacher, or a kid of any age who loves art and stories you may just be in the right place”. The generosity of this welcome sets the tone for her site and for her practice.
Ringgold, originally a painter, makes painted story quilts, mixtures of painted and quilted fabrics, pictorial in content, frank in form and accessible in style. Apparently simple, they tell stories of lives lived as African-American women and men in a culture constructed from their blood, sweat and tears, and often neglectful of their needs and aspirations. And, by sewing soft pictures, with narrative imagery and colourful motifs, Faith Ringgold persists in making a strong and memorable impact.
Text by Dr. Catherine Harper
Faith Ringgold’s website – www.faithringgold.com – states “if you are an artist, writer, teacher, or a kid of any age who loves art and stories you may just be in the right place”. The generosity of this welcome sets the tone for her site and for her practice.
Ringgold, originally a painter, makes painted story quilts, mixtures of painted and quilted fabrics, pictorial in content, frank in form and accessible in style. Apparently simple, they tell stories of lives lived as African-American women and men in a culture constructed from their blood, sweat and tears, and often neglectful of their needs and aspirations. And, by sewing soft pictures, with narrative imagery and colourful motifs, Faith Ringgold persists in making a strong and memorable impact.
Image: Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles. 74 x 80 cm, acrylic on canvas. Image above: detail from The Men: Mask Face Quilt. 178 x 157 cm acrylic on canvas.
Faith Ringgold was born in 1930 and raised in New York, experiencing the double politicisation of a black urban woman at the genesis of feminism and the birth of 'black power'. As a young female artist in the early 1960s, Ringgold felt the full forceful affect of the Civil Rights movement and the first wave of US feminist activism. These turbulent and energising influences were reflected at that early point in her artistic career in her adoption of bold, graphic images in dark colours and her desire to represent black faces, cultures and histories in a visual culture almost exclusively drawn from European white male tradition.
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