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Ringgold the liberator
Faith Ringgold is one of the most important US artists ever. CHRISTINE LINDEY explains why
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=NelWFXbprk4

Faith Ringgold
Serpentine Gallery, London
★★★★★

A VETERAN of the 1960s civil rights, feminist and Black Power movements, Faith Ringgold is a rare artist; she has much to say, all of it important and she expresses it in visually striking ways.

[[{"fid":"15342","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"1"}}]]She was born in 1930 in Harlem where her fashion designer/maker mother and lorry driver father prioritised a college education and encouraged her love of art. Although her thorough but traditional art education never mentioned black artists, she’d grown up immersed in the culturally vibrant Harlem Renaissance.

The major African-American painter Jacob Lawrence lived in her neighbourhood and visited her parents’ home as did Duke Ellington and other artists, and she delighted in the vivid spectacle of the weekly Sunday parades of live choirs, musicians and people in their best finery.

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