Faith Ringgold's hard-hitting messages of African-American women's issues become accessible to a wide audience through her use of whimsical, bright-colored images that are presented in a refiguring of traditional mediums such as quilts, dolls, and story-telling.

Lowery Sims writes:
African-American women have created a niche for themselves between the traditional and innovative… Their "holistic" approach to art--from painting, sculpture, drawing, and watercolor, to photography and installation--indicates additionally a will to break boundaries and  create new parameters… While her[Ringgold's] work has covered a wide range of political subject matter--from mapping the destructiveness of racial strife in this country, to the paradoxes of racism in the context of technological achievement, to the exclusion of African Americans from mainstream art history--her message has been rendered more

accessible by her adoption of a strong, direct figuration and poster-like organization of images and text. Ringgold would later use performance art in a similar way to make work that " the community could relate to easily (Robinson 88).

Faith Ringgold was born in Harlem on October 8, 1930. Her immediate family was her mother Willi Jones, her father Andrew Jones, Sr., and her two older siblings Andrew and Barbara (Ringgold 3).

Ringgold grew up in Harlem. At the age of two her parents separated. Ringgold also experienced her first asthma attack at the age of two. She never went to kindergarten or most of the first grade due to her asthma. Faith and her mother spent much time together, a closeness that would continue through her lifetime (Ringgold 4).

In 1948, Ringgold graduated from Morris High School in the Bronx. She went on to City College in New York. Women were not allowed to declare a major in the School of Liberal Arts, so Ringgold registered in the School of Education majoring in Art and Minoring in education. (Ringgold 34).

Many instructors tried to discourage her from being an artist. This made Ringgold only more determined. (Ringgold 35).

At 20 years old Faith Ringgold, to the dismay of her mother, married her high school sweetheart Robert Earl Wallace. Faith writes, " It was time for me to leave home. In 1950 that meant getting married, since no respectable young woman of twenty left home on her own. I was in my junior year at college and the 2 years until graduation were an eternity. It seemed as if Earl and I had been meant for each other, he a musician and I an artist. We were two struggling artists who could if need be, live off love." (Ringgold 41).