Her quilting pattern of using eight triangles derives from the designs of the people from the Kuban Kingdom in Central Africa. The text is embedded within the sky as the figures soar above the bridge and buildings.

In the last of her five-series quilts from the 1990s, Ringgold produced a series called Woman on a Bridge, which highlights the dreamlike idealism of women claiming ownership over bridges in New York and San Francisco. Ringgold integrates various techniques that derive from the African-American quilting tradition to convey her experience as a woman of colour. Ringgold thus is reinstating her identity as a successful African-American woman in the United States. As argued by art historian Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Ringgold reinterprets the ‘Dilemma Tale’, whereby problems are posed but left unresolved, by ‘integrating ironic details’ and reinforcing black people’s nuanced viewpoints and their ‘full humanity’. Through the combination of the quilt format, stitchery, photo-etching, and the interweaving of traditional folktales and contemporary stories, she gives power to women’s voices, while men lose their dominant position in the composition. Through her artistic sensitivity to the integral role that fabric and quilts has played in women’s history, as well as perhaps the relationship to the African storytelling tradition of the ‘Dilemma Tale’, Ringgold dramatically refabricates the past and presents histories of black women’s tales within American social history promoting the optimistic possibility for future change in the process.

The story quilts served as vehicles for merging together the narrative components of her family’s oratory tradition with the historical content of the African-American experience from various female perspectives. Through the mediums of sculpture and painting on fabrics, Ringgold wilfully revolted against the mainstream advents of art, making haunting figurines of masks and bodies that expressed the horrific nature of racial oppression in America, especially vis-à-vis stories of drug abuse, physical violence, and female oppression.īeginning in the 1980s, Ringgold began to create her notorious ‘story quilts’, for which she gained international recognition. Faith Ringgold has been instrumental in weaving African-American lives and artworks into the fabric of the Western art historical canon. During the late 1960s and 1970s Ringgold served as a key leader in the activist movements protesting in proto-feminist artist campaigns and producing works that promoted Black Power in order to redefine and reclaim her African-American identity.īy the 1970s and beyond, much of Ringgold’s work was inspired by the non-Western traditions of African mask making and Tibetan thangkas, whereby she began to explore the medium of fabric to create three-dimensional forms and enliven her figures.

Tar beach faith ringgold quilt