Faith Ringgold Groovin High

Prolific American artist Faith Ringgold long championed civil rights and women’s rights through her work, which spans media from oils to textiles. Over the course of her career, she received numerous accolades, including two National Endowment for the Arts awards, one each in sculpture and painting, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1987) and more than 20 honorary doctorate degrees.

Born Faith Willi Jones in Harlem, New York, Ringgold grew up surrounded by creativity. She was raised by a fashion-designer mother and a minister father who was a talented storyteller during the peak of the Harlem Renaissance. She earned both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in visual art from the City College of New York, in 1955 and 1959, respectively.

In the 1960s, Ringgold’s paintings took a decidedly political bent, supporting the civil rights movement; she protested the lack of work by Black and female artists in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York City. She also cofounded Where We At, a collective of Black female artists. By the 1970s, Ringgold had moved away from painting and on to textiles, sculpture and performance art.

Ringgold created masks of painted canvas inspired by wooden masks made by the Dan peoples of Liberia — also to promote the work of women in art — as well as acrylic works that combined the style of Tibetan thangkas, or silk paintings, with African quilting techniques. This led to her collaborating with her mother in the 1980s for the development of her iconic story quilts, for which Ringgold is perhaps best known.

Ringgold's work can be found in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, all in New York, as well as the Baltimore Museum of Art and many more.

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Decorating with fine art prints — whether they’re figurative prints, abstract prints or another variety — has always been a practical way of bringing a space to life as well as bringing works by an artist you love into your home.

Pursued in the 1960s and ’70s, largely by Pop artists drawn to its associations with mass production, advertising, packaging and seriality, as well as those challenging the primacy of the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke, printmaking was embraced in the 1980s by painters and conceptual artists ranging from David Salle and Elizabeth Murray to Adrian Piper and Sherrie Levine.

Printmaking is the transfer of an image from one surface to another. An artist takes a material like stone, metal, wood or wax, carves, incises, draws or otherwise marks it with an image, inks or paints it and then transfers the image to a piece of paper or other material.

Fine art prints are frequently confused with their more commercial counterparts. After all, our closest connection to the printed image is through mass-produced newspapers, magazines and books, and many people don’t realize that even though prints are editions, they start with an original image created by an artist with the intent of reproducing it in a small batch. Fine art prints are created in strictly limited editions — 20 or 30 or maybe 50 — and are always based on an image created specifically to be made into an edition.

Many people think of revered Dutch artist Rembrandt as a painter but may not know that he was a printmaker as well. His prints have been preserved in time along with the work of other celebrated printmakers such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. These fine art prints are still highly sought after by collectors.

“It’s another tool in the artist’s toolbox, just like painting or sculpture or anything else that an artist uses in the service of mark making or expressing him- or herself,” says International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) vice president Betsy Senior, of New York’s Betsy Senior Fine Art, Inc.

Because artist’s editions tend to be more affordable and available than his or her unique works, they’re more accessible and can be a great opportunity to bring a variety of colors, textures and shapes into a space.

For tight corners, select small fine art prints as opposed to the oversized bold piece you’ll hang as a focal point in the dining area. But be careful not to choose something that is too big for your space. And feel free to lean into it if need be — not every work needs picture-hanging hooks. Leaning a larger fine art print against the wall behind a bookcase can add a stylish installation-type dynamic to your living room. (Read more about how to arrange wall art here.)

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