Faith Ringgold is an American painter, sculpture and performance artist best known for her narrative quilts.
Faith Ringgold started her career as an artist by being a painter. However she soon switched to quilt making because she felt that it was a better way for her to show her creative expression.
Her very first story quilt project was titled�“Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima?”
This work by Ringgold has a deep meaning about the struggles of African American women. It tells the story of a successful African American woman and breaks the negative stereotype of a "mammy", a African American nanny in charge of white children. The Aunt Jemima character originated in 1800's and is still used on baking products to this day. Ringgold decided to take matters into her own hands by making this story quilt to shed new and positive light on "Aunt Jemima".
Here’s another one of her story quilts: “Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles.”
A quilting bee is a gathering of friends and neighbors who come together to work on creating the squares to form a quilt.
A group of famous African-American women are holding a quilting bee. Here in Arles, France, they meet the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, who made paintings of sunflowers. The heroines pictured are: Madame C. J. Walker, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Mary McLeod Bethune and Ella Baker.
When Faith Ringgold was in her early eighties she started playing a game called Suduko, which is a number puzzle. She noticed how the nine-by-nine grids, bear a resemblance to quilts.
So Ringgold decided to take Sudoku’s similarities with her artwork a step further by creating Quiltuduko,“an art-making game.” Quiltuduko replaces the game’s customary numbers with simple drawings – everything from geometric patterns and nature imagery to seemingly random squiggles and drawings of human faces.
And here is Quiltuduko.
This is an example of Suduko.
At 86 years old Faith Ringgold invented a app that now is available all over the world.
For today’s art project we will be doing our own inspired by Faith Ringgold’s quilts and her app “Quiltuduko”.