Faith Ringgold: The David C. Driskell Series of African American Art, Vol. 3

The story of Faith Ringgold--activist, author, academician--is an uplifting look at a progressive artist who overcame discrimination and triumphed as a giant figure in American art, notable as an accomplished painter, a sculptor, a printmaker, and an art quilter. She has never abandoned her goal of searching for human dignity and empowerment for fellow African Americans while tirelessly fighting against discrimination. Faith Ringgold is a captivating look at the personal and professional life of one of the country's most notable female artists. Selected works from several of her famous series are presented, including The Flag Is Bleeding, Help: the Slave Rape Series #11, The Purple Dolt Series, Mother's Quilt, and We Came to America. Lisa E. Farrington is a faculty member at Parsons School of Design in New York City, where she teaches art and race and gender issues. A former Mellon Foundation fellow and recipient of numerous academic awards and honors, she is the author of Creaing Their Own Image; African-American Women Artists (Oxford University Press, 2004) and Art on Fire; The Politics of Race and Sex in the Paintings of Faith Ringgold (Millennium, 1999). Faith Ringgold has produced an amazingly diverse body of work, from oils to collages, thangkas to masks, posters to children's books. She is most famous for her quilts, which combine painting, fabric, and narrative text. She has been awarded sixteen honorary doctorates, and she founded the Anyone Can Fly Foundation. The art produced by this Renaissance woman has been exhibited in major venues worldwide and collected by such prestigious institutions as The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ringgold tenaciously overcame race and gender discrimination in school and in the art world. Her first works were traditional, but by 1963 she had developed her first mature painting style: "super realism," influenced by the writings of James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka. Her famous The American People Series of oil paintings appeared, along with her first murals, including The Flag Is Bleeding and Die. While pursuing her career and raising a family, Ringgold also spearheaded the black and feminist art movements.

Ringgold subsequently developed her "black light" style, in which she used a palette of darkened colors, in search of a more affirmative black aesthetic. The tireless artist then pursued new artistic venues, developing thangkas and hanging soft sculptures, completing abstract paintings, creating her first dolls, and working on The Family of Woman Masks Series.

In the 1980s Ringgold began making her story quilts, which redefined and expanded the possibilities for expression in the textile arts. By the 1990s she was one of the foremost progressive American artists of the twentieth century and a successful author. Today she pursues painting a series of jazz quilts and working on four books. Following Charles White and Betye Saar in Pomegranate's David C. Driskell Series of African American Art, Faith Ringgold details the personal and professional paths of a steadfast woman who forged to have her art seen. Her story is a testimonial to the inherent strength and determination of an expert artist whose work always penetrates the intellect as forcefully as it grabs the heart.