Faith Ringgold - Activism

Activism

Ringgold has been an activist since the 1970s, participating in several feminist, anti-racist organizations. In 1970, Ringgold, fellow artist Poppy Johnson, and art critic Lucy Lippard, founded the Ad Hoc Women's Art Committee and protested the Whitney Annual, a major art exhibition held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Members of the committee demanded that women artists account for fifty percent of the exhibitors and created disturbances at the museum by leaving raw eggs and sanitary napkins on its grounds and by gathering to sing, blow whistles, and chant about their exclusion. That same year, Ringgold and her daughter, the writer Michele Wallace, founded Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL). Around 1974, Ringgold and Wallace were founding members of the National Black Feminist Organization. Ringgold was also a founding member of the "Where We At" Black Women Artists, a New York-based women art collective associated with the Black Arts Movement.