Faith Ringgold died on April 13, 2024, in Englewood, New Jersey, at age 93, closing a seven-decade career as a boundary-breaking artist, author, and activist.
Faith Ringgold died on April 13, 2024, in Englewood, New Jersey, at the age of 93. Her death was reported widely by major cultural institutions and news outlets, including The New York Times, marking the end of a career that spanned more than seventy years and fundamentally reshaped American art and children's literature.
At the time of her death, Ringgold had just seen the culmination of decades of critical recognition, including a major retrospective, Faith Ringgold: American People, which had opened at the New Museum in New York in 2022 — her first-ever New York retrospective despite her lifelong residence and career in the city. She was widely regarded as a pioneer of narrative quilting, feminist art, and children's book illustration, most famously for her Caldecott Honor–winning book Tar Beach (1991).
Her death prompted an outpouring of tributes from museums, universities, and fellow artists who credited her with breaking barriers for Black women in the American art establishment, both through her unflinching political paintings like the American People Series and through her innovative story quilts that merged fine art with textile tradition historically dismissed as "women's craft." Ringgold's legacy continues through her foundation, her extensive body of work held in major museum collections including MoMA, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim, and generations of artists and children who encountered her storytelling.