A Great Show of Faith at UC San Diego

 By Lonnie Burstein Hewitt. Photos by Maurice Hewitt.

 

Faith Ringgold: Self Portrait. 2023

There’s no better way to celebrate Women’s History Month than spending some time at UCSD’s Mandeville Gallery with the current exhibition Faith Ringgold: Full Circle - The Teachings and Her Legacy.

 

 Sunflower Quilting Bee. 2023. 
Silkscreen on silk with pieced fabric border. 
(The above piece is a copy; the original is owned by Oprah Winfrey.
How to tell an original? See if it’s signed by the artist.)

Though best known for her story quilts, which moved what was formerly rated as female craftwork into the realms of fine art, this show is a chance to admire the breadth of the artistry of this Harlem-born woman who was a well-loved professor of Visual Arts at UCSD from 1976-2002.

Children’s Books

United States of Attica. Offset print. 1972. (Referencing the 1971 uprising at New York State’s Attica Prison when inmates were demanding better conditions.)

Dancing on the George Washington Bridge. Silkscreen on silk. 2020. (She could see the bridge from her home in Harlem.)

Born in 1930 as Faith Willi Jones--Ringgold was the last name of her second husband--she was a painter, author, performance artist and activist who encouraged her students to include their own personal narratives in their artworks.

Change 2: Faith Ringgold’s More Than 100 Pounds Weight Loss Performance Story Quilt. Photolithography on canvas. 1988.

California Dahs. Acrylic on canvas. 1983. (Her only abstract paintings, created after the death of her mother, Willi Posey Jones, who taught her to sew and collaborated on some of her early pieces. Might these be prayer rugs? Dah was a word her first baby granddaughter--also named Faith--used to say.)

Committee to Defend the Panthers.  Serigraph. 2023.
The Black Panthers were an organization created in the mid-1966s
to challenge police brutality.

Dancing at the Louvre. Silkscreen on silk with pieced fabric border. 2023.

Somebody Stole my Broken Heart. Silkscreen. 2024.

Ultimately, Faith Ringgold returned to the east coast, where she lived in suburban Englewood, New Jersey, continued making art, and died after a long, full life in 2024.

The exhibition was curated by Mashonda Tifrere, an international curator and advocate for visual artists who has been working with UCSD for the past two years. She has also written and recorded a mindfulness-based audio tour of their Stuart Collection of outdoor public art.

Here’s a special treat: a link to the video that is part of the Ringgold exhibit.  And you’ll be able to see Mashonda in this too.  

Faith Ringgold: Full Circle - The Teachings and Her Legacy.
On view through June 2026.
Mandeville Gallery at UC San Diego, La Jolla.
Hours: Wednesday-Friday, 12-8 p.m.

 

Lonnie Burstein Hewitt is an award-winning author/lyricist/playwright who has been writing about arts and lifestyles in San Diego County for over a dozen years. You can reach her at hew2@sbcglobal.net