Faith Ringgold
| Faith Ringgold | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Faith Willi Jones October 8, 1930 Harlem, New York City |
| Education | City College of New York |
| Known for |
Painting Textile arts |
Faith Ringgold (born October 8, 1930, in Harlem,New York City) is an African-American artist, best known for her narrative quilts.
Faith Ringgold was born the youngest of three children on October 8, 1930 in Harlem Hospital, New York City. Her parents, Andrew Louis Jones and Willie Posey Jones, descended from working-class families displaced by the Great Migration. Because her mother was a fashion designer and father an avid storyteller, Ringgold was exposed to creativity from an early age. After the Harlem Renaissance, Ringgold’s childhood home in Harlem was left with a vibrant and thriving arts scene. Figures like Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes lived just around the corner from her home. Her childhood friend, Sonny Rollins, who would later become a prominent jazz musician, often visited her family and practiced his saxophone at their parties. Because of her chronic asthma, Ringold explored visual art as a major pastime through the support of her mother, often experimenting with crayons as a young girl. In a statement she later made about her youth, she said, “I grew up in Harlem during the Great Depression. This did not mean I was poor and oppressed. We were protected from oppression and surrounded by a loving family.”. With all of these influences combined, Ringgold’s future artwork was greatly affected by the people, poetry, and music she experienced in her childhood, as well as the racism, sexism, and segregation she dealt with in her everyday life.
In 1950, due to pressure from her family, Ringgold enrolled at the City College of New York to major in art, but was forced to major in art education instead because art was thought to be an exclusively male profession. The same year, she also married a jazz pianist named Robert Earl Wallace and had two children (Michele Faith Wallace and Barbara Faith Wallace). However, because of his heroin addiction, they separated four years later. In the meantime, she studied with artists Robert Gwathmey, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and was introduced to printmaker Robert Blackburn, with whom she would collaborate on a series of prints 30 years later.
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