Dinner at Aunt Connie's House by Faith Ringgold

After the Harlem Renaissance, Ringgold's childhood home in Harlem became surrounded by a thriving arts scene – where figures such as Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes lived just around the corner. They raised her in an environment that encouraged her creativity. Ringgold's mother was a fashion designer and her father, as well as working a range of jobs, was an avid storyteller. Her parents, Andrew Louis Jones and Willi Posey Jones, were descendants of working-class families displaced by the Great Migration. She currently lives and works in Englewood, New Jersey.Faith Ringgold was born the youngest of three children on October 8, 1930, in Harlem Hospital, New York City. She is professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego where she taught art from 1987 to 2002. The recipient of more than 75 awards, including 22 Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degrees, she has received fellowships and grants from the National Endowment For the Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, La Napoule Foundation, New York Foundation For the Arts, and many more for painting and sculpture. Rosa Parks won the NAACP’s Image Award in 2000. She has helped young readers explore African American history through Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky. Dinner at Aunt Connie’s Househonors Civil Rights activists Fannie Lou Hamer, Mary McCleod Bethune, Zora Neale Hurston, and many more famous Black women. If a Bus Could Talk: The Story of Ms.

Since the 1990s she has also written and illustrated many acclaimed children’s books such as Tar Beach that was a Caldecott Honor Book and winner of the Coretta Scott King Award. Singer Center on Rikers Island The Crown Heights Children’s History Quilt at Public School 22 in Brooklyn, New York and many others across the country. Guggenheim Museum’s permanent collections, make up some of her best known masterpieces from this period.įaith Ringgold has also produced numerous public art works including: Flying Home: Harlem Heroes and Heroines for the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s 125th Street subway stop For the Women’s House for the Rose M. Works such as the 1988 Tar Beach (Part I from the Woman on Bridge Series) in the Solomon R. In the 1980s, she embarked on projects that employed the medium of the “story quilt” rooted in African American communal traditions of quilting and storytelling that have been critical for connecting family stories and lives across many generations. She also organized and fought for works of African American and women artists to be included into museums and galleries. In the 1960s as an art teacher in the New York City public schools, she began a series of paintings called American People that portrayed the Civil Rights movement from a female perspective.

Born and raised in Harlem, New York City her career as an educator, artist, and activist spans more than half a century.

Dinner at Aunt Connie's House by Faith Ringgold