I love being an artist and sharing my vision with the world. I believe that creativity is a powerful force that can help us overcome fear and oppression. I don't wait for others to define me or tell me what I can or cannot do. I write my own story and paint my own picture. I draw inspiration from my African heritage, my American experience, and my feminist perspective. I want to inspire other women and children to follow their dreams and fly among the stars.
I was born in Harlem in 1930. My family included educators and creatives, and I grew up surrounded by the Harlem Renaissance. The street where I was raised was also home to influential activists, writers, and artists of the era—Thurgood Marshall, W.E.B. Dubois, and Aaron Douglas, to name a few. It’s nice to come up in a period where great changes are being made, and that was my period: the ’30s to the ’60s, when radical changes were being made.
I got a fabulous education in art—wonderful teachers who taught me everything except anything about African art or African American art. But I traveled and took care of that part myself.
I began my career painting landscapes and still-lifes in the style of modern European masters. I quickly pivoted to focus on my own experience and the political and social tensions that surrounded me, namely the struggle for equality among women and the black community.
I believed you should never make something, as an artist or even as a writer, that is outside of your experience. People will use what is available to them. I am black and I am a woman. There it is.
The ’60s also gave birth to my role as an activist. In 1968, I organized a demonstration protesting the omission of black artists in a Whitney Museum show highlighting American sculptors of the ’30s. Two years later, I was on the front lines of another demonstration at the Whitney—this time protesting the woeful dearth of female artists across the museum’s exhibition program. The demonstrators brandished police whistles, feminine products, and eggs. I boiled mine, painted them black, and wrote 50 percent on them [to indicate the percentage of women who should be included in shows. It felt like we were doing something and were a part of the movement in America to equalize things.
No other creative field is as closed to those who are not white and male as is the visual arts. After I decided to be an artist, the first thing that I had to believe was that I, a black woman, could penetrate the art scene, and that, further, I could do so without sacrificing one iota of my blackness or my femaleness or my humanity."
I became a feminist because I wanted to help my
daughters, other women and myself aspire to something more than a place behind
a good man. I had something I was trying to say and sometimes the message is an
easy transmission and sometimes it's a difficult one, but I love the power of
saying it so I'm gonna do it whether it's hard or easy.
In 1971, I took up a residency of my own design at Rikers Island. For several months, I interviewed women incarcerated in the Women’s House of Detention. I asked inmates what they hoped to see in the site-specific painting that I would create for the space.
Many of them voiced the opinion that they wanted to be able to see women being things in the world other than some of the things they had gotten arrested for. A year later, For the Women’s House was installed on the walls of the prison: It showed women of all races working in an expansive range of professions, many of them traditionally associated with men: doctors, police officers, basketball players. In the corner of the composition, an open book reads: “I knew someone had to take the first step. –Rosa Parks.” It’s felt like a fitting tagline.
I made my first quilt, “Echoes of Harlem”, in 1980, in collaboration with my mother and my first story quilt “Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?” was written in 1983 as a way of publishing my unedited words. The addition of text to my quilts has developed into a unique medium and style all my own.
My first book, the award-winning “Tar Beach” has won over 20 awards for the best-illustrated children’s book of 1991. An animated version with Natalie Cole as the voice over was created by HBO in 2010. The book is based on the story quilt of the same title from “The Woman on a Bridge Series”. My original painted story quilt, Tar Beach, is in the permanent collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.
A few years later came my autobiography and first book for an adult audience “We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold” as well as the children’s book “My Dream of Martin Luther King” were published in 1995. To date I have illustrated 17 children’s books.
Creativity helps us realize that we don't have to understand everything. We can enjoy something - feel it and use it - without ever fully comprehending it. Anyone can fly. All you need is somewhere to go that you can't get to any other way. The next thing you know, you're flying among the stars.
You can’t sit around waiting for somebody else to say who you are. You need to write it and paint it and do it. That’s the power of being an artist. And while the subjects and scenes that fill my compositions are inspired by the American experience, the themes are universal: inequality and the struggle for its eradication. At age 93... I see the need for this still.