Curated by Mashonda Tifrere | Featuring the work and legacy of Faith Ringgold

By Cory-LaNeave Jones

April 15, 2026

“I have always wanted to tell my story – or, more to the point, my side of the story”
–Faith Ringgold

Maya Angelou once said:

“Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.”
— (“Still I Rise,” 1978)

There are rooms that hold paintings, and then there are rooms that hold breath. The Mandeville Art Gallery at the University of California, San Diego—sunlight bending across La Jolla’s cliffs—become, under the stewardship of curator Mashonda Tifrere, something closer to a sanctuary. Here, works of Faith Ringgold do not merely hang, fold, or lay—they speak, testify, and remember aloud.

Her art has influenced many people. When I spoke with Bisa Butler last year, she lauded the works of Faith as a direct inspiration for her own works. For many, she may be remembered for her beautiful illustrations in the book of children’s poems written by Gwendolyn Brooks called Bronzeville. Bronze’s have been the focus of art through the ages, but of course Gwendolyn was speaking to a group of people with more melanin than was typically celebrated in books, poetry, and illustrations of the day. This book of poems was a celebratory presentation of inclusion in culture of the United States.

Faith was a powerful figure in the annuls of the illustrious UC San Diego Art Department’s celebrated former faculty. She originated in Harlem in 1930 and earned a bachelor’s and master’s at City College of New York, in an era when women were not allowed to be much more than homemakers.

Faith was a force of nature. She didn’t take no junk, as they say. She expressed the world that she walked in as she felt it. She borrowed classical artistic techniques from across the ages: usage of symmetry, chiaroscuro, and text. She “acted up” to protest against the patriarchy in the art world of the 1960’s and 1970’s, well before the Guerrilla Girls began their feminist rebuttals to presentations of women in art museums in 1985.

Sometimes, she would express her “dissatisfaction” with the political state of affairs, such as her reflection on the U. S. flag. Many artists have seen flags as opportunities for resistance, David Hamonds, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Barbra Kruger and Jasper Johns come to mind.

The many harrowing tragedies of the civil rights movement of the 1960’s led Ringgold to view the world in a painful light.

“How could I, as an African American woman artist, document what was happening around me?”

Similar to the anguish of past artists who witnessed atrocities such as Francisco Goya during the Napoleonic era and Pablo Picasso during World War II, Ringgold viewed the continued oppression of Black Americans when she painted her American People Series in 1967.

“I was terrified because I saw ‘Die’ as a prophecy of our times.”

It is still chilling to think of the amount of social division that still resonates today.

Ringgold’s art has always insisted on a kind of narrative sovereignty. From her seminal quilt painting Tar Beach to politically charged canvases like American People Series #20: Die, she has stitched together a visual language that collapses the distance between story and close-up reality. Her work lives in the lineage of both the Harlem Renaissance storytelling and postwar abstraction, yet belongs entirely to itself—a form of witnessing that is at once intimate and insurgent.

In the California Dah Numbers 1, 2, and 3, we can see the full understanding of abstraction – a web of colors representative of how we weave our way through this complicated world. This piece reminds me of similar color-centric works by Sam Gilliam or Odili Donald Odita. In San Diego—a city that often sees itself through ocean light rather than historical shadow—Ringgold’s presence feels corrective, necessary, and quietly revolutionary.

II. The Curator’s Frame: Mashonda Tifrere’s Intimate Radicalism

If Ringgold’s work is a voice, then Tifrere’s curatorial approach is an act of listening. Known for her work at the intersection of art, healing, and community, Tifrere resists spectacle. Instead, she offers something subtler: proximity.

One might say the exhibition is less about declaring meaning than about noticing it—how a quilt holds tension between its seams, how a painted figure refuses erasure by sheer insistence of gaze. Tifrere arranges the works not chronologically but emotionally, allowing viewers to encounter Ringgold not as a historical figure but as a living interlocutor.

In this quilt, Faith identifies how even troubled northern Europeans held faith with the love of beautiful things in the world. And she identified others who also presented a plentitude of beauty for the world to behold. She loved to split quilts into geometrically symmetrical shapes. Preaching, Teaching, and Leading by example. Her “Sunflower Quilting Bee” pays tribute to both Vincent Van Gogh and at the same time a multitude of “matri-archetypes” including Madam C.J. Walker, Sojourner Truth, Ida Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, Harriot Tubman, Rosa Parks, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Ella Baker.

There is, too, a distinctly Black feminist architecture to the show—one that echoes the narrative layering found in writers like Toni Morrison and Tayari Jones. Memory is not linear here; it is recursive, looping, unfinished.

III. The Work: Quilts as Testimony, Paintings as Reckoning

Ringgold’s story quilts operate as both object and oracle. They recall the domestic traditions of Black American women—crafts passed through generations, often unrecognized within the canon of “fine art.” Yet in Ringgold’s hands, the quilt becomes declarative, even confrontational.

In Tar Beach, a young Black girl flies over Harlem, claiming the city as her own. It is a gesture of radical imagination—what might be described as the permission to dream beyond the given script. The work does not ignore structural constraint; it transcends it through narrative.

Meanwhile, American People Series #20: Die remains as urgent now as it was in the wake of 1960s racial violence. Figures—Black and white—collapse into chaos, their bodies entangled in a choreography of brutality. It is impossible not to think of Civil Rights Movement, or of its unfinished aftermath. The fallout of the Rodney King beating and of the BLM movement – George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmad Arbery, Timir Rice, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Atatiana Jefferson, Daunte Wright, Amir Locke – #SayTherNames.

Here, Ringgold aligns with the prophetic clarity of James Baldwin, who wrote:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

– Baldwin, James. “As Much Truth As One Can Bear.” The New York Times Book Review. January 14, 1962.

Ringgold’s canvases face what many would rather not see.

IV. The Feminine as Force

To speak of Ringgold is to speak of Black womanhood—not as a category, but as a multiplicity. Her work insists that Black women are not marginal to American art history; they are central to it.

This insistence resonates deeply with the intellectual and cultural frameworks articulated by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Tavia Nyong’o. Ringgold refuses singular narratives. Her women are mothers, dreamers, workers, rebels—often all at once.

In this, her work becomes both mirror and map for Black American women, offering visibility where there has long been absence, and complexity where there has been flattening.

And yet, her reach extends further. For women broadly, Ringgold’s practice models an alternative to patriarchal authorship. She does not separate art from life; she integrates them. She writes, she paints, she quilts—each medium reinforcing the other.

In her piece, “Dancing on the George Washington Bridge,” she shows a myriad of black women dancing on the George Washington bridge. It’s a joyful occasion, black joy at it’s finest.

Faith demonstrated that you don’t have to be in the club to get ya groove on, you can dance on the bridge between the past and our inclusive future. Take my hand, I can teach you the cha cha slide. We can all celebrate, sing, and dance together.

V. San Diego: A City in Conversation with History

What does it mean for this exhibition to exist in San Diego—a city often framed by leisure, military presence, and coastal beauty?

The Mandeville Art Gallery at UC San Diego becomes a site of encounter. Students and visitors move through the gallery carrying their own histories—immigrant stories, military affiliations, coastal imaginaries. Ringgold meets them there, offering not answers but provocations.

For Black residents of San Diego, the exhibition may feel like a recognition long deferred—a moment in which their histories are not peripheral but centered. For others, it is an invitation to reconsider what—and who—has been omitted from dominant narratives of American life.

One might say the exhibition reveals not only Ringgold’s work, but the viewer’s own position within a larger cultural text.

VI. The Artist as Ancestor

“We are each other’s magnitude and bond.”
— Gwendolyn Brooks, “Paul Robeson” (1945)

Faith Ringgold, now an elder in the American artistic canon, occupies a space that feels less like conclusion and more like continuation. Her work does not close conversations; it opens them.

In this way, she aligns with the literary inheritance of Zora Neale Hurston, who understood storytelling as both preservation and transformation. Ringgold’s quilts are not static objects; they are living documents—archives of feeling, resistance, and imagination.

VII. Coda: Toward a Shared Sky

To walk through this exhibition is to encounter a particular kind of truth—not the declarative truth of history textbooks, but the layered, contested, deeply human truth of lived experience.

In the end, Ringgold offers what all great artists offer: a way of seeing differently. And in seeing differently, perhaps, a way of being differently.

San Diego, with its shifting light and contested histories, becomes—if only for the duration of this exhibition—a place where stories are not only told, but honored.

And somewhere above it all, like the child in Tar Beach, a figure rises—unbound, unafraid—claiming the sky as her own.

Faith Ringgold: Full Circle is available for viewing at UCSD’s Mandeville Gallery Wednesday through Friday from noon to 8 pm, until May 1, 2026.