Faith Ringgold was an American artist, born in Harlem in 1930 and dead in New Jersey in 2024, who invented the story quilt: a painted scene framed in sewn cloth, with a handwritten story across it. She is remembered for Tar Beach, a quilt of a girl flying over the George Washington Bridge that became a prizewinning children's book, and for forcing New York museums to make room for Black women artists.
Her best known work started as a rejection letter.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
Ringgold had written her autobiography, and publishers turned it down. So she put her words where no editor could cut them. She painted a scene, wrote the story along the edges, and framed it in cloth sewn with her mother, the Harlem dress designer Willi Posey. As she explained, when the quilts were hung on a wall or photographed for a book, people could still read her stories.
The art world had no shelf for them. The woman who stitched a rooftop daydream into a quilt had been arrested in 1970 for organizing an exhibition of flags, and she had spent years protesting outside the museums that later bought her work.
Today the Guggenheim owns Tar Beach, and the Museum of Modern Art hangs her largest painting next to Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon.
What You'll Discover
Who taught her to sew.
What she painted before the quilts.
Why police came to a church.
Who Aunt Jemima became.
Where the girl on the roof flies.