“I think of quilts as the classic art form of Black people in America,” said Ms. Ringgold in The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa., in 2005. “When African slaves came to America, they couldn’t make their sculpture. They were separated from their religion. So they will take pieces of cloth and make them into blankets for the master and for themselves.”
In 1983, frustrated by her inability to find a publisher for a memoir she had written, Ms. Ringgold incorporated narrative text into her quilts. Few artists of the time were doing anything of the sort.
The first of her story quilts, “Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?,” reimagined the original stereotyped figure — the fat, feisty Black woman, drawn from a minstrel show, that many Blacks considered offensive. In the quilt of Ms. Ringgold, Jemima is transformed into a Black feminist role model: trim, elegant and a successful entrepreneur.
In the late 1980s, after an editor at Crown Publishers saw “Tar Beach,” Ms. Ringgold turned that quilt into a picture book. The resulting work tells the story of 8-year-old Cassie Lightfoot — the daughter of a picnicking family — who one magical night in 1939 soared through the city’s rooftops to soar above the George Washington Bridge.
“I can fly — yes, fly,” read Ms. Ringgold. “I, Cassie Louise Lightfoot, am only eight years old and in the third grade, and I can fly. That means I am free to go wherever I want for the rest of my life.”
The art of Ms. Ringgold has been acquired by many private collectors, including Maya Angelou and Oprah Winfrey. It was also commissioned for public spaces, including the 125th Street subway station on the Lenox Avenue line in Manhattan, where two enormous mosaic murals, collectively titled “Flying Home,” depict legendary Black figures such as by Josephine Baker, Malcolm X and Zora Neale Hurston.
