Remembering Faith Ringgold (1930–2024)
A multimedia celebration of the artist’s more than 50 years of art and activism
Esther Adler, Ann Temkin, Anne Umland
Apr 17, 2024
Artist Faith Ringgold speaking in front of her work United States of Attica (1972) for the Gallery Talks by Artists series, which formed part of the weeklong Contemporary Art in Context program, March 4, 1988
Thinking of Faith Ringgold, as are so many others, at this sad moment of her passing, my first thoughts are of gratitude: for Faith’s unflinching, profoundly inspiring art, and her vision of the important role it could play in moving this country, and the larger world, toward a better place. I’m also grateful to Faith for her warm-hearted generosity of spirit and for her feisty, frank, funny, and fierce intelligence, which always helped me see things more clearly. She was a remarkable woman. She left all of us with a remarkable legacy. I regularly give her children’s books as gifts, hoping that if enough of them are out there, and read, silently and aloud, changes in attitudes will come about. The world is a sadder, darker place without Faith’s luminous presence, but how very, very fortunate we all are to have her art, and her writing, still with us, ensuring that her essential voice and unwavering vision will live on.
—Anne Umland, Senior Curator, Department of Paintings and Sculpture
There are a number of archival photographs of the artist Faith Ringgold protesting in front of The Museum of Modern Art in the early 1970s. What has always struck me most about these images—even more than the irony of this artist now receiving such a warm welcome within this institution—is who appears with her: her daughter Michele Wallace. Wallace is an admired and established writer and scholar in her own right, but for me, in these photos, she’s Faith Ringgold’s kid. There they are, together, standing up for something. This partnership with women, those who came before and those who follow, is embedded in every aspect of Ringgold’s work, and is key to its enduring power and relevance. In her 1995 illustrated book Seven Passages to a Flight, Ringgold mentions her own mother (with whom she would collaborate on her first quilt work) and her wisdom in a majority of the texts; MoMA’s collection includes dynamic prints that proclaim “Woman Freedom Now” and “Woman Free Yourself.” Ringgold recognized the power and agency of women, and the shared responsibility of supporting those qualities. Her own power lives on in her extraordinary art, and in her legacy of protest aimed at making sure growing audiences had access to it, as well as that of other women artists. I hope we can continue to honor her vision through our work at the Museum.
—Esther Adler, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints
Faith Ringgold. Woman Freedom Now. 1971
Faith Ringgold. People’s Flag Show. 1971
With the passing of the magnificent artist Faith Ringgold at the age of 93, MoMA has lost a dear and true friend. Her relationship with the Museum was profound and long-ongoing. MoMA was important enough to her to bring her daughters here from Harlem to introduce them to art as young girls, to return again and again herself to study closely Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (on view at MoMA during the mid-20th-century), and to cowrite a 1969 letter noting “the glaring shortcomings of the Museum vis-a-vis the black and Puerto Rican communities.”
For a very long time, Ringgold loved the Museum even if it did not exactly love her back. So many things that she valued and prioritized were rarely the focus of interest at MoMA during the latter half of the last century: women and children as art makers, subject matter, and viewers; race relations and other sociopolitical topics as fitting and necessary bases for artistic expression; homegrown art forms and traditions such as quilting; inexpensive and populist mediums such as children’s books. But instead of opposing herself to MoMA’s modernism, she embraced it and transformed it, melding abstract stylization with messages of protest, morphing Guernica into American People Series #20: Die, and narrating Black characters right into Henri Matisse’s studio or Gertrude Stein’s home in Paris.
How immensely lucky we are that Ringgold lived long enough to watch—with an inimitable down-to-earth regality—the Museum, and the international art world as a whole, catch up with her.
—Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture
In honor of the artist’s life, watch our 2020 Virtual Views conversation between Faith Ringgold and Senior Curator Anne Umland; hear Ringgold read one of her picture books; listen to her playlist, discover how a poet laureate was inspired by Ringgold’s painting, learn more about Ringgold’s activism, and read an excerpt from MoMA’s One-on-One book on Die.