Faith Ringgold (1930 - 2024)

 

Self Portrait (1965)

I can fly — yes, fly.  Me, Cassie Louise Lightfoot, only eight years old and in the third grade, and I can fly. That means I am free to go wherever I want for the rest of my life.

Faith Ringgold wrote those words in a children's book adapted from one of her signature quilts, "Tar Beach."  While she taught public school art classes in the Bronx, white men hogged the art world spotlight.  Rarely have I been as gobsmacked by an exhibit as her New Museum retrospective in 2022.  At least she lived to see it.

What she managed to do, in those early paintings,  writes New York Times critic Holland Carter, was put aside all the conventional art tools she’d been schooled with, beauty among them (she would later reclaim it), in order to face down the world as it really was, including an art world that had no use for her — a Black woman — and was, in fact, fortressed to keep her and everyone like her out.

Certain artists manage to leap over walls. Picasso was one. And some tunnel under those walls, hit resistance, tunnel some more and, once inside, open a door to let others in. That’s what Faith Ringgold, artist-activist to the end, did.

More Entries Featuring Work by Faith Ringgold:

Silver Lining

The New Modern

Transcending Marginalization

Raphael Montañez Ortiz

New York: 1962 - 1964

The Bountiful Whitney

Outside the Palace of Me