Soon afterwards, inspired by African art, she began making hooded masks, dolls and other figures of padded textiles, beads and raffia. She worked on these figures together with her mother, Willi Posey, a seamstress and fashion designer. Ringgold incorporated these works, along with music and dance, in performance pieces that explored issues of race, gender and identity in America.
By the 1980's she was painting both images and texts on fabrics, resulting in what she called story quilts. Her mother pieced and quilted the first of these new works, Echoes of Harlem (1980), before her death in 1981.
Ringgold’s work has been shown in galleries and museums worldwide and she has received numerous awards, including twenty-two Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degrees. She is professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, where she taught art from 1987 until 2002.
See also the TRC Needles entry on Cuesta Benberry.
Sources:
- www.faithringgold.com (retrieved 7th May 2016).
- www.guggenheim.org (retrieved 7th May 2016).
- www.pbs.org/americaquilts (retrieved 7th May 2016).
Digital source of illustration (retrieved 1st July 2016).
SA