Window of the Wedding #3: Woman (left); Window of the Wedding #4: Man (right), 1974

Acrylic on canvas, with pieced-fabric border
© 2022 Faith Ringgold/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; courtesy ACA Galleries, New York. Photo by Dario Lasagni.

Faith Ringgold was an artist, activist, teacher, and children’s book author, perhaps best known for her story quilts, which combine narratives drawn from her own experiences as a Black woman with politics and social history to “tell my story, or, more to the point, my side of the story.” In 1972 Ringgold encountered a gallery of fifteenth-century Tibetan and Nepalese thangka paintings while visiting the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Offering a solution to her ongoing difficulties with storing and transporting large canvases, the thangka format was lightweight and infinitely mobile. Ringgold’s Window of the Wedding thangka series is characterized by vivid abstract patterning inspired by Kuba textiles. With titles that refer to “small talk,” “patience and responsibility,” and “family”—alongside “man” and “woman”—the works in this series imagine the foundational components of a marriage. They were also used as backdrops for soft sculptures depicting couples that Ringgold made around the same time