10/08/2026
“Children need to see themselves in stories, so that they’ll learn that their image, too, is beautiful.” - Faith Ringgold.
Artist Faith Ringgold was born on this day in 1930.
Ringgold’s work crossed art, writing, and activism. She spent much of her career fighting for more representation of women of color in galleries and museums. Her story quilts have become vehicles for Black feminist thought and offer much-needed alternatives to childhood favorites whose protagonists are white.
“Shades of Alice,” Ringgold’s story quilt in the MAD collection, retells “Alice in Wonderland” as a reflection on Black girlhood. Around the central painting Ringgold wrote out by hand, the adventures of a young Black girl who finds herself in a situation very different from that of Lewis Carroll’s Alice:
“Now I cannot find the white rabbit, and I am in a strange inner city with no sky. Peculiar looking animals who talk peer out of windows in buildings that have small doors. They have threatened to eat me, but they cannot agree on who or what I am, or how they should cook me. I told them my name is Alice in Wonderland and that I am Through the Looking Glass. They told me there was an Alice here once but that she looked nothing like me and that I must be someone else; so, they have made me stand on a stack of “Alice in Wonderland” books until I say who I really am.”
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Faith Ringgold
Shades of Alice, 1988/93
Canvas, fabric, acrylic paint
