Faith Ringgold Boxed Notecard Set: Sunflower Quilting Bee

Faith Ringgold told the truth with thread, paint, and patchwork. Across six decades, she stitched American history into story quilts that pulled the contributions of Black women out of the margins and placed them at the center of the page. This boxed notecard set carries four of her most beloved images into your hands, ready to be sent as birthday wishes, thank-you notes, words of comfort, and everyday "I'm thinking of you" greetings. Every card is a small piece of a movement, a portable reminder that art and activism have always lived in the same room.

The set features twenty blank notecards (five each of four designs) showcasing Ringgold's signature style: vivid color, narrative composition, fabric borders, and a clear-voiced reverence for Black life, music, family, and freedom.

Faith Ringgold (1930 to 2024) was born in Harlem and grew up in the Sugar Hill neighborhood, where she absorbed the rhythms of jazz, the discipline of community, and the quilting traditions her mother and great-great-grandmother carried forward. She earned her degree from the City College of New York in 1959, taught in the New York City public schools for nearly two decades, and turned to fine art full-time in the 1970s. After traveling in Europe and encountering Tibetan thangkas, she devised her now-iconic painted story quilt form, framing painted canvas with quilted fabric borders and weaving narrative text directly into her compositions. Her work resides in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, among many others. She authored more than twenty-five books, including the children's classic Tar Beach, and received dozens of honorary doctorates over her lifetime.

The four featured artworks include:

Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles (1996), the title piece and cover image, gathers eight powerful African American women in a field of sunflowers: Madam C.J. Walker, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Ella Baker. They hold a sunflower quilt described in the work itself as "an international symbol of our dedication to change the world." A ninth figure, Willia Marie Simone, is a fictional character Ringgold created who travels through Europe as an artist. Vincent van Gogh stands at the right, a quiet acknowledgment that quilting belongs in the same conversation as the masters of European painting. The lithograph is part of Ringgold's celebrated French Collection series.

Sonny's Quilt (1986) depicts jazz tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins playing alone on the Williamsburg Bridge, where he famously practiced from 1959 to 1961 so as not to disturb his Lower East Side neighbors. Ringgold and Rollins grew up together in Harlem's Sugar Hill, and Sonny's Quilt is her tribute to a lifelong friend whose sound shaped her childhood. The patchwork fabric border surrounds a glowing blue New York skyline.

Woman Flying with Bouquet (1988) belongs to Ringgold's celebrated Woman on a Bridge series, in which her female figures soar over the George Washington Bridge in flight, claiming the bridge and the city for themselves. Of this series, Ringgold said her women are "actually flying; they are just free, totally. They take their liberation by confronting this huge masculine icon, the bridge." The white-gowned figure carries a bouquet and a briefcase, freedom and ambition together in midair.

Groovin' High (1986) takes its title from the 1945 Dizzy Gillespie bebop standard and captures the joyous abandon of Sunday afternoon dances at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. Couples swirl across a black-and-white checkered floor, set against a tie-dyed patchwork border, the whole composition pulsing with the energy of Black social life and the music that built it.

Each notecard is printed in full color on premium 250 gsm card stock, using soy-based inks on FSC-certified paper. The set arrives in a sturdy decorative gift box with twenty soft white envelopes, ready to be presented as a gift or kept on your desk for whenever the moment to write someone calls. This is a meaningful purchase for art lovers, civil rights history enthusiasts, jazz fans, quilters, art teachers, and anyone who believes the women named on these cards deserve to be remembered every time we put pen to paper.