Faith Ringgold was an American artist, born in Harlem, New York, in 1930, who died in Englewood, New Jersey, in 2024. She developed the story quilt: a painted scene set inside a border of sewn cloth, with a story she wrote by hand on the fabric.
Her best known quilt, Tar Beach, shows a Harlem girl flying over the George Washington Bridge, and it became a children's book. She is also known for her fight to open New York museums to Black women artists.
She spent years protesting outside the museums that later bought her work. Even her story quilts began with a refusal: publishers had turned down the story of her life.
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She was born Faith Jones on October 8, 1930, and grew up in an apartment that ran on fabric and talk. Her mother, the dress designer Willi Posey, taught her to sew. In the evenings, relatives who had come north from the South told stories, and the girl learned her family's history by listening.
Asthma kept her indoors as a child, so she drew, and her mother encouraged it. Quilting ran further back in the family. Her grandmother had learned it from her own mother, a woman who had been enslaved.
Yet decades passed before Faith made a quilt of her own. When she finally did, in 1980, her mother sewed it with her.
City College and a family
Long before the quilts, Faith Ringgold wanted to paint…
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