Internationally known painter, mixed-media sculptor, performance artist, writer and teacher Faith Ringgold will visit the Creative Arts Center Thursday, Sept. 14, to deliver WVU ’s first Myerberg Distinguished Visiting Artist Lecture.
Ringgold’s lecture,”More Than 30 Years Making Art,”begins at 7:30 p.m. in the CAC Concert Theatre, and will be followed by a public reception in the CACs main lobby.
The Division of Art also will host a touring exhibition of her work in the CAC Mesaros Galleries Sept. 7-Oct. 21.
Faith Ringgold has received much attention for her story quilts, soft sculptures and books that recognize African American and women’s history. Her work is in the collections of such major art institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the National Museum of American Art.
She began her artistic career more than 35 years ago as a painter. Today, she is best known for her painted story quiltsart that combines painting, quilted fabric and storytelling. She is currently professor of art at the University of California in San Diego and lives and works in both La Jolla, Calif., and Englewood, N.J.
After receiving bachelor’s and master’s degrees in visual art from the City College of New York, Ringgold taught art in the New York City public schools. During the 1950s, she began spending summers in Provincetown, Mass., doing oil paintings of houses, landscapes, fishing boats and the ocean.
It was on Martha’s Vineyard in the 1960s that she developed her first mature painting style, influenced by the writings of James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones). This work she calls”super realism.”It resulted in her first political paintings, the American People Series.
She also began development of”black light”using a palette of darkened colors in pursuit of a more affirmative black aesthetic.
In 1970 she co-founded Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation and did her first feminist art action, demanding that 50 percent women and blacks be included in a Liberated Venice Biennale.
She began a series of political posters and, in 1971, after doing a poster called”United States of Attica,”she won a grant to do a mural for the Women’s House of Detention on Riker’s Island. This painting used all-female imagery for the first time and as a result a group called Art Without Walls was formed to bring art to prison inmates.
After seeing an exhibition of Tibetan art in Amsterdam, Ringgold began making tankas-inspired by a Tibetan art form of paintings framed in richly brocaded fabric-soft sculptures and masks.
She began making dolls, Family of Women masks and her Slave Rape Series of paintings. She also developed hanging soft sculptures and did a series of abstract paintings based on African Kuba design, and used them as an environment for soft sculptures.
In the mid-70s she began to do art performances with masks and costumes and created her first stuffed figures and first portrait masks.
Although Ringgold’s art was initially inspired by African art in the 1960s, it was not until the late 1970s that she traveled to Nigeria and Ghana to see the rich tradition of masks that have continued to be her greatest influence.
She made her first quilt,”Echoes of Harlem,”in 1980. The quilts were an extension of her tankas from the 1970s. However, these paintings were not only bordered with fabric, but quilted, creating a unique way of painting using the quilt medium.
Ringgold’s first story quilt,”Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?”was written in 1983 as a way of publishing her un-edited words. The addition of text to her quilts has developed into a unique medium and style all her own.
In the mid-80s she participated in exhibitions organized by Artists Against Apartheid. In the late 1980s she was artist-in-residence in France and in 1990 she returned there to complete a series of 12 painted story quilts about Willa Marie Simone, an African American woman who goes to Paris in 1920 at the age of 16 and becomes one of the most celebrated expatriate artists in Europe.
Her most recent work,The American Collection, is a 12-part series that continues her process of re-writing art history to include women and African Americans. In The American Collection, Willa Marie Simone’s daughter, Marlena Simone, is the heroine and becomes a celebrated fixture in the American art scene.
Ringgold’s first book, the award-winning Tar Beach, was published by Crown Publishers in 1991. It has won more than 20 awards, including the Caldecott Honor and the Coretta Scott King award for the best illustrated children’s book of 1991.
The painted story quilt,”Tar Beach,”is in the permanent collection of the Guggenheim Museum.
She has published six children’s books and in 1994 she received a contract from Little, Brown to publish her autobiography and first book for an adult audience, We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold.
Ringgold is the recipient of more than 50 awards and honors, including The National Endowments for the Arts Award for sculpture and for painting, The La Napoule Foundation Award for painting in France, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for painting, and the New York Foundation for Arts Award for painting.
Her visit to WVU is made possible through the generous support of Cynthia and David Myerberg. Cynthia Myerberg received her M.A. in studio art from WVU in 1999. She is an award-winning artist who works primarily in fabric, making art quilts. Her work has been juried into national and international exhibitions and she is the co-author of two books on fabrics and quilting. David Myerberg practices law in Morgantown with Jackson and Kelly PLLC . He was formerly associate professor of pediatrics and attending neonatologist at WVU Hospitals.
All WVU Division of Art events are free and open to the public. Mesaros Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday, from noon to 9 p.m. The galleries are closed Sundays and University holidays. For more information, contact Kristina Olson, curator, at 293-2140, Ext. 3210.