Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of Oct. 8th
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It is the 281st day of the year, leaving 84 days remaining in 2022.
On this date in 1930, the educator, author and artist, Faith Ringgold, was born in New York City.
She tells her stories in a variety of media.
She painted about the ongoing civil-rights movement, often from a feminist perspective, inspired by the Impressionist and Cubist movements, by African art, and by writers like James Baldwin. The best known of these, American People #20: Die, shows a tangle of black and white bodies, bloodied, with their eyes wide in terror.
She sculptures soft textures, such as masks, to represent real and fictional characters.
She writes children's books, often adapted from her own artistic works. She addressed issues of racism, combining reality and fantasy to create uplifting messages.
But perhaps Ringgold's greatest artistry comes from her narrative quilts, which she started creating in the 1980s. She combines painted images with words to convey open-ended narratives. Her first one, in 1983, was Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima? It turned the caricature of a black mammy into a savvy business woman.
Ringgold is an activist and educator. She taught in New York's public schools in the 1950s and '60s. From 1987 to 2002, she was a professor at the University of California, San Diego.
As part of the prison abolitionist movement, in 1972 she painted murals that were displayed in the women's wing of Rikers Island, the city's jail on an island in the East River.
Throughout her life, she has agitated for better representation for woman, particularly Black women, in arts and in museums.
In 2022, the New Museum in New York held a retrospective of her work, Faith Ringgold: American People.
She currently lives and works in Englewood, N.J.
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