Faith Ringgold
United States, b. 1930

Faith Ringgold is an African American painter, soft sculptor, and performance artist
who sews her contemporary paintings into story quilts. She grew up in the Sugar Hill
section of Harlem in New York City.

Ringgold started out as a traditional painter. Her education, like that of any other art
student in the 1950s, was in the European tradition. In drawing class, the students
all worked from plaster Greek statues. For a while she painted traditional landscapes.
During the civil rights movement in the 1960s, she turned to political themes.

Eventually Ringgold began to develop her own style. She went through a period of
learning about African art and searched for a way to paint people of African heritage.
She wanted to be realistic, but she felt that shading was not the best way. That was
when she began painting flat. She understands how to use perspective, but she
chooses flatness because she likes it. Often she finds herself painting large heads on
bodies. In African art, a large head is traditional.

In the 1970s, Ringgold used masks and soft sculptures designed by her mother to
express her feelings about the realities of African American women's lives. She
combined the art pieces with performances for which she wrote stories. She acted
them out and incorporated music and dance into her storytelling. Her story quilts of
the 1980s are also performance pieces.

To create the story quilts, Ringgold starts out with an idea and then writes the first
draft of the story. In the final planning, she works on graph paper so that all the
areas are planned to scale.