Awards
2011 Distinguished Feminist Award
Faith Ringgold
Faith Ringgold (photograph by Grace Matthews)
Faith Ringgold has been a forceful voice for feminism, successfully and gracefully encapsulating crucial issues of race despite the often-contentious relationship between gender and race in enfranchisement movements over the last four decades. Her work not only captures the strength of black women in fighting slavery, oppression, and sexual exploitation, but it also chronicles the dreams of black women who sought to transcend circumstance and find a brighter future. As a committed activist, Ringgold was a founder of Women, Students, and Artists for Black Liberation and a cofounder and member of Where We At, a collaborative active in the 1970s and 1980s that comprised black women artists.
Ringgold uniquely marries her politics to her practice. Her American People paintings (1963–67) and Black Light series (1967–71) sought to examine how traditional color values could be modified for black subjects. From there she explored traditions of “women’s work” in fabric, first in collaboration with her late mother, the seamstress and designer Willie Posey, and then in her Story Quilts, which have become her signature statement. With a variety of techniques and media—from stitchery and quilting to drawing and painting—Ringgold has constructed narratives from a black women’s perspective, frequently autobiographical in approach either in fact or in aspiration. The artist also explored her struggles with weight and self-image and has delved into the politics of intergender relationships with racial nuances. In perhaps her most exhilarating body of work, the French Collection, she chronicled life of a black woman artist named Willia X in France while deconstructing the presence of black culture in the history of modern art.
Faith Ringgold, Coming to Jones Road #2, Part 2: We Here Aunt Emmy Got Us Now, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 68 x 63 in. (© Faith Ringgold)
Ringgold’s commitment to young people has been consistent over the years. Her foundation, Anyone Can Fly, hosts an annual benefit that raises money to support young artists, and she has written and illustrated eleven books for children. Her first, Tar Beach (1991), was the sole Caldecott Honor book for 1992 and also won the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration in the same year. She is currently working to establish a Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling in Harlem.
Ringgold’s impressive résumé as an artist includes exhibitions in major museums in the United States, Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The Studio Museum in Harlem organized a twenty-year retrospective of her work in 1984. Most recently, the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College gathered early work for American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold’s Paintings of the 1960s. The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, Ringgold earned a BS in fine art and education and a MA in art from City College of New York. She taught in the New York City Public School system from 1955 to 1973 before joining the University of California, San Diego as a professor of art, where she worked from 1984 to 2002.
Jury: Lowery Stokes Sims, Museum of Arts and Design, chair; Frima Fox Hofrichter, Pratt Institute; and Moira Roth, Mills College.
