The pioneering visual artist Faith Ringgold, whose body of work spanned paintings, sculptures, performance art, and widely celebrated story quilts, died this week at 93. Throughout her career, Ringgold was known not only for her creative output, but also her commitment to Black liberation, feminism, the Art Workers Coalition (the group that eventually convinced MoMA and other museums to institute a free-admission day), and a host of other activist groups and causes.
“No other creative field is as closed to those who are not white and male as is the visual arts,” Ringgold once said. “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.” That refusal to sacrifice her core identity was a major part of what made Ringgold such an iconoclast.
In honor of her life, we’ve gathered five of her most significant artworks—along with details about where to see them in person.
The Civil Rights Triangle, 1963 (from the American People Series, currently at the Glenstone Museum in Maryland)
Ringgold’s American People series, perhaps her best-known body of work, was created by the artist as a response to “the paradox of integration felt by many Black Americans.” This piece, which shows a white man at the apex of a triangle of Black men, alludes to the longtime white leadership of the NAACP and examines the constraints placed on Black Americans, even within a civil rights movement allegedly built around their liberation.
Big Black, 1967 (from the Black Light series, currently at the Pérez Art Museum Miami)
This painting, the first in Ringgold’s Black Light series, draws inspiration from the composition of African sculpture. “In order to make people beautiful, I had to create clearly defined abstract shapes,” Ringgold said of this period of her work, during which she resisted using white in any of her paintings.
America Free Angela, 1971
Ringgold was an impassioned defender of Black activist, scholar, and author Angela Davis, who was arrested by the FBI in 1970 on charges of kidnapping and conspiracy to commit murder; imprisoned for nine weeks in New York City; and eventually acquitted on all charges. This collage, which drew visual inspiration from the motifs of the Kuba tribe of Central Africa, was Ringgold’s contribution to an international movement of support for Davis in the weeks and months following her arrest.
For the Women’s House, 1971 (formerly on Rikers Island)
This large-scale mural—which Ringgold created for the Women’s House of Detention in New York City after being awarded a Creative Arts Public Service (CAPS) grant by the New York State Council on the Arts in 1971—was installed on Rikers Island in 1972. The artwork led to the creation of Art Without Walls – Free Space, a program aimed at enriching the lives of incarcerated people—a group that Ringgold was well-known for championing in her art and activism. (She visited Rikers once a month to provide courses on everything from theater courses to drug addiction prevention.)
Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?, 1983 (currently at the Glenstone Museum in Maryland)
Perhaps Ringgold s best-known story quilt, this piece takes its name from the Edward Albee play and tells the story of a fictional Black woman from New Orleans in a direct attempt to counter the racist “Aunt Jemima” trope in American culture. “When they re looking at my work, they re looking at a painting and they re able to accept it better because it is also a quilt,” Ringgold said of transitioning mediums from oil paintings to quilts in the 1980s.
