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I had the unique pleasure of meeting Ms. Faith Ringgold many times throughout my life and journey as an artist. My very first encounter with her was in 1996, when my mother brought home Tar Beach. It was my favorite book as a child. I saw myself in Cassie, the precocious little girl in the picture book. I loved Tar Beach because I understood it, not simply on an intellectual level but on a deeply emotional plane. I understood the world built by Ringgold in the grace and clarity of her rendered figures, at leisure in Harlem and with family and friends on lawn chairs placed upon a hot black tarred roof. The book is based on a story quilt of the same name, which is part of Ringgold’s 1988 “Woman on a Bridge” series. Ringgold’s ability in Tar Beach to capture both the mundane and the utterly fantastical aspects of Black American life has always stuck with me and shaped my worldview.
In high school, in 2008, I met Faith Ringgold for the first time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was very excited to have the opportunity to meet an artist whose work I had looked at so often in my childhood. During my last year of high school I promised to fully immerse myself in any artistic environment I could find. I didn’t fully understand at the time that I was a painter—or an artist at all, for that matter. All I knew was that I loved art and being around people who made it. I had the good fortune to land a weekend internship at the Met, which was about a 10-minute walk from my school. I participated in an interview there, which won me a seat on a panel with the esteemed Ringgold, along with a fellow intern, toward the end of my senior year. We asked Ringgold about her trajectory as an artist and any advice she would like to bestow on younger individuals hoping to pursue a career in the arts. She spoke with great care and compassion, talking honestly about the difficulties she encountered and the optimism she held for herself and the next generation of artists.
Later, as an adult and a working artist, I was able to interview Ringgold again, most recently in 2022 for the Brooklyn Rail. When I asked what might be her favorite work in her New Museum retrospective that year, Ringgold replied, “You know what? I love everything I’ve done. Sorry. [Laughter] Yeah, I love my work, or I would not have completed it. I can’t think of one that’s more to my liking than another. Seeing so much of my work together gives me a great deal of satisfaction and peace.”
What stuck with me, in both 2008 and 2022, was Ringgold’s self-assured nature and confidence as well as her sincerity, humor, and love for people. That last one is an undervalued quality in an artist, for how can you speak truth to power, in regard to the human condition, if you do not truly love your fellow (wo)man? Ringgold was a great artist with a generosity of spirit that illuminated all that she touched.
Faith was an apt name for a woman and a visionary such as Ms. Ringgold, whose trajectory as an artist restored faith in so many who have become jaded by the cynicism and turbulence of the art world, turbulence most often directed at the perceived other. As an activist and an artist, she spent her career fighting for people who are marginalized in the mainstream art community and within broader Western society. As an outspoken feminist and advocate for Black liberation, she long maintained resolve in her own voice and abilities, believing—rightly so—that her work could and would change the minds of multitudes, creating new perspectives for the culture in regard to what an artist should and could be. There are few artists who, through the simultaneous use of craft and figuration, have achieved the specificity that she did through her story quilts. The mere gesture of reclaiming the quilt as a painting substrate was revolutionary, for she literally had to do away with a rigid framework.
Thank you, Ms. Ringgold, for your joy and for your anger. Thank you for fighting for yourself and for others. Thank you for loving yourself—your womanhood and your Blackness. Thank you for being kind to me and so many others. Thank you for your time and your vision. You will forever be remembered and very sorely missed.
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