Stories Of Race In America Captured On Quilt And Canvas : NPR

Stories Of Race In America Captured On Quilt And Canvas : NPR: Artist Faith Ringgold is best known for what she calls her story quilts — large canvases made in the 1980s, on which she painted scenes of African-American life: sunbathing on a tar roof, a mother and her children, a quilting bee. She frames the canvases in strips of quilted fabric, carrying out an old African, and African-American quilt-making tradition.

The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington is showing an earlier aspect of Ringgold's art: big, strong, vivid paintings from the 1960s that reflect the violence and social upheaval of that time.

Faith Ringgold is now 83 — and still stunning with her long braids and colorful beads. "[It] was important to be determined," she says of her time developing as an artist in the 1960s. The stop signs that appeared in the pop art movement spoke to her: "There were a lot of stop signs in my life. ... People telling you what to do, when to do it, and so on," she says.