Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold was an American artist best known for narrative story quilts that combine painting, quilted fabric, and hand-written text to tell stories addressing race, gender, and American history, most famously in her Tar Beach series, later adapted into an award-winning children's book. Trained initially as a painter, she developed the story quilt format in the 1980s partly as a way to work outside the constraints of the traditional stretched canvas and gallery painting market, drawing on African American and African textile and quilting traditions historically excluded from the fine art establishment. Ringgold was also a lifelong civil rights and feminist activist who campaigned for greater representation of Black and women artists in American museums, and her combination of textile craft, painting, and storytelling significantly expanded the accepted vocabulary of American fine art.