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quilts served as vehicles for merging together the narrative components of her family’s oratory tradition with the historical content of the African-American experience from various female perspectives.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.
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