As a child, the multifaceted American artist Faith Ringgold—painter, sculptor, performer—was surrounded by creativity. Born in 1930 at Harlem Hospital, during the Harlem Renaissance, her neighborhood was a bastion for the arts and crafts. As a young woman Ringgold visited Paris, where she was taken with the quilts in the Louvre. When she returned to America, she began to experiment with quilting, infusing the patchwork pieces with political comment and titling these new works the “French Collection.” Ringgold’s quilted narratives, as well as her paintings, drawings, and sculptures, are filled with personal and national history. This exhibition honors the late artist’s increasingly revered oeuvre. “Just as she fought tirelessly against the prevailing sentiments of racial and gendered exclusion of both her time and our own,” says the gallerist Jack Shainman, “so too did her inimitable work in textiles provide an example of how life and art—so often presumed to be separate—are in fact deeply and fundamentally intertwined.” —Elena Clavarino