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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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Realist art attempts to portray its subject matter without artifice. Similar to naturalism, authentic realist paintings and prints see an integration of true-to-life colors, meticulous detail and linear perspectives for accurate portrayals of the world. 

Work that involves illusionistic techniques of realism dates back to the classical world, such as the deceptive trompe l’oeil used since ancient Greece. Art like this became especially popular in the 17th century when Dutch artists like Evert Collier painted objects that appeared real enough to touch. Realism as an artistic movement, however, usually refers to 19th-century French realist artists such as Honoré Daumier exploring social and political issues in biting lithographic prints, while the likes of Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet painting people — particularly the working class — with all their imperfections, navigating everyday urban life. This was a response to the dominant academic art tradition that favored grand paintings of myth and history. 

By the turn of the 20th century, European artists, such as the Pre-Raphaelites, were experimenting with nearly photographic realism in their work, as seen in the attention to every botanical attribute of the flowers surrounding the drowned Ophelia painted by English artist John Everett Millais.

Although abstraction was the guiding style of 20th-century art, the realism trend in American modern art endured in Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth and other artists’ depictions of the complexities of the human experience. In the late 1960s, Photorealism emerged with artists like Chuck Close and Richard Estes giving their paintings the precision of a frame of film.

Contemporary artists such as Jordan Casteel, LaToya Ruby Frazier and Aliza Nisenbaum are now using the unvarnished realist approach for honest representations of people and their worlds. Alongside traditional mediums, technology such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence and immersive installations are helping artists create new sensations of realism in art.

​​Find authentic realist paintings, sculptures, prints and more art on 1stDibs.

Bring energy and an array of welcome colors and textures into your space by decorating with figurative fine-art prints and works on paper.

Figurative art stands in contrast to abstract art, which is more expressive than representational. The oldest-known work of figurative art is a figurative painting — specifically, a rock painting of an animal made over 40,000 years ago in Borneo. This remnant of a remote past has long faded, but its depiction of a cattle-like creature in elegant ocher markings endures.

Since then, figurative art has evolved significantly as it continues to represent the world, including a breadth of works on paper, including printmaking. This includes woodcuts, which are a type of relief print with perennial popularity among collectors. The artist carves into a block and applies ink to the raised surface, which is then pressed onto paper. There are also planographic prints, which use metal plates, stones or other flat surfaces as their base. The artist will often draw on the surface with grease crayon and then apply ink to those markings. Lithographs are a common version of planographic prints.

Figurative art printmaking was especially popular during the height of the Pop art movement, and this kind of work can be seen in artist Andy Warhol’s extensive use of photographic silkscreen printing. Everyday objects, logos and scenes were given a unique twist, whether in the style of a comic strip or in the use of neon colors.

Explore an impressive collection of figurative art prints for sale on 1stDibs and read about how to arrange your wall art.