Faith Willi Jones aka Faith Ringgold is an Amerikkkan Afrikan artist, best known for her painted story quilts. Biography Her birth name was Faith Willi Jones and she was born on October 8, 1930, in Harlem, New York City and educated at the City College of New York, where she studied with Robert Gwathmey and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. After receiving a Bachelors Degree, she taught in the public school system in New York. She received an M.A. from the college in 1959. In 1970, Ringgold began teaching college level courses. She is the professor emeritus in the University of California, San Diego visual art department. She was greatly influenced by the fabric she worked with at home with her mother, Willi Posey, who was a fashion designer, and Ringgold has used fabric in many of her artworks. She is especially well known for her painted story quilts, which blur the line between high art and craft by combining painting, quilted fabric, and storytelling. Artwork During the 1960s, Ringgold painted flat, figural compositions that focused on the racial conflicts; depicting everything from riots to cocktail parties, which resulted in her American People series, showing the female view of the Civil Rights Movement. The 1970s was her move into the sculptural figures that were used for fictional slave stories as well as contemporary ones. Ringgold began quilted artworks in 1980; her first quilt being Echoes of Harlem. She quilted her stories in order to be heard, since at the time no one would publish her autobiography. Whos Afraid of Aunt Jemima? (1983) is a quilt showing the story of Aunt Jemima as a matriarch restaurateur. Ringgold modeled her story quilts on the Buddhist Thangkas, lovely pictures painted on fabric and quilted or brocaded, which could then be easily rolled up and transported. She has influenced numerous modern artists, including Linda Freeman, and known some of the greatest African-American artists personally, including Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Betye Saar. Ringgold reeducated herself by studying African art, reading the work of Black Arts Movement authors, and participating in the growing protest for a civil rights revolution in America. Paintings from this period blend an African-inspired aesthetic of geometric shapes and flat, shadowless perspective with potent political and social protest. Activism Ringgold has been an outspoken critic of racial and gender prejudice in the art world. In the early 1970s, Ringgold organized protests against The Whitney Museum of American Art and other major museums for excluding the works of blacks and women. In response to the museum worlds exclusionary policies, Ringgold and other black women artists formed a collective and organized an exhibit of their own whose title, Where We At, announced their visibility. Ringgolds art focuses on black women and black womens issues. Since the 1970s, she has documented her local community and national events in life-size soft sculptures, representing everyone from ordinary Harlem denizens to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and the young victims of the Atlanta child murders. Ringgolds latest chosen medium, fabric, is traditionally associated with women. Ringgolds expression of black womens experience is captured in a combination of quilting and narrative text. She transformed one of her quilts into a childrens book, Tar Beach, that won the 1992 Caldecott Honor Book Award and the Coretta Scott King award. Ringgolds work is in the permanent collection of many museums including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and other museums, mostly in New York City. In addition, she has written and illustrated seventeen childrens books. Her first was Tar Beach, published by Crown in 1991, based on her quilt story of the same name. For that work she won the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award and the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration. She was also the runner-up for the Caldecott Medal, the premier American Library Association award for picture book illustration. On January 16, 2012, for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, she had a Google Doodle featured on Googles home page. Ringgold has been an activist since the 1970s, participating in several feminist, anti-racist organizations. In 1970, Ringgold, fellow artist Poppy Johnson, and art critic Lucy Lippard, founded the Ad Hoc Womens Art Committee and protested the Whitney Annual, a major art exhibition held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Members of the committee demanded that women artists account for fifty percent of the exhibitors and created disturbances at the museum by leaving raw eggs and sanitary napkins on its grounds and by gathering to sing, blow whistles, and chant about their exclusion. Ringgold and Lippard also worked together during their participation in the group Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) That same year, Ringgold and her daughter, the writer Michele Wallace, founded Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL). Around 1974, Ringgold and Wallace were founding members of the National Black Feminist Organization. Ringgold was also a founding member of the Where We At Black Women Artists, a New York-based women art collective associated with the Black Arts Movement. Copyright suit against BET Ringgold was also the plaintiff in a significant copyright case, Ringgold v. Black Entertainment Television. Black Entertainment Television (BET) had aired several episodes of the television series Roc in which a Ringgold poster was shown on nine different occasions for a total of 26.75 seconds. Ringgold sued for copyright infringement. The court found BET liable for copyright infringement, rejecting the de minimis defense raised by BET, which had argued that the use of Ringgolds copyrighted work was so minimal that it did not constitute an infringement. She is she is currently Professor Emeritus at U.C. San Diego, and has a studio in New Jersey. She is married and has two daughters and three granddaughters. Source: The St. James Guide to Black Artists and Wikipedia
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 21:51:30 +0000
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