Faith Ringgold, Renowned Black Artist and Activist, Dies at 93
Faith Ringgold, the versatile artist who explored race and identity through her multimedia work, died on Saturday at her New Jersey home, her daughter told The New York Times. The artist was 93 years old.
Ringgold gained acclaim for her richly woven decorative quilts, which often vibrantly depicted the ordinary life of Black women. A classically trained painter and sculptor, she also worked across a variety of other media, often fusing her art and activism with political works that captured racial tensions in the 1960s and 1970s. She also protested with others who wanted elite art institutions to feature more Black and women artists, and was a vocal critic of museums that left them out.
“In a world where having the power to express oneself or to do something is limited to a very few, art appeared to me to be an area where anyone could do that,” she told the Orlando Sentinel in 1992.