Artist Faith Ringgold To Speak At Spelman College

Faith Ringgold began telling stories though art when she was a little girl living in Harlem, New York.

She used the simplest of supplies.

A few times Ringgold needed to stay home from school because of her asthma, “so my mother would go to school and get my homework assignments and with that she would make sure I had my crayons and paints and whatever I needed to make my art.”

But it never occurred to Ringgold that art could be a career.

“now did I think I was going to be an artist, no I didn’t that I thought art was something to do not necessarily to be”

But Ringgold was obsessed with art and in 1948 after graduating from high school she sought to study at New York City College.

But there was a problem, Ringgold says, “city college in 1948 did not accept women in the school of liberal arts and that’s the school I wanted to go to be artist.”

Ringgold found a way to study her craft by majoring in art with a minor in education.

But teaching didn’t totally allow Ringgold to be fully expressive.

She needed to reveal more layers to her artistic side.

Ringgold quit teaching at the age of 42.

Afterwards she sculpted, painted, wrote children’s book and her autobiography.

Ringgold is credited as the originator of the African American story quilts.

Her first story quilt was Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima.

The fictional African American woman used to sell pancake flour.

Ringgold also captured on canvas one of the most turbulent times in American history.

She calls it American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold’s Paintings of the 1960s:

“I mean the height of racism is looking, seeing, seeing someone that who looks different from you and then deciding something based on that, based on what I’m seeing I’m not used to, doesn’t look like my family and I   was very much excited  about painting pictures  of this”

Ringgold’s exhibition is at The Spelman Museum of Fine Art thru May 19^th.