Faith Ringgold's artistic life flashed before the eyes of an appreciative crowd that nearly filled Sweet Briar Memorial Chapel on Thursday evening, March 31.

"I'm going to take you back to the 1960s, a wonderful period that many of you missed," Ringgold said, following an introduction by Misty Vandergriff, Sweet Briar class of '04.

The 74-year-old Harlem native drew laughter from a diverse audience whose members ranged from school-age children to the artist's contemporaries. "Well, you didn't live through it in reality, but you didn't miss it, because so much of this country was changed in the 1960s," she said to younger listeners. "I'm hoping and praying that the 2000s will be a repeat of that period - that we'll have a peace movement and do away with war and violence. It could happen. I hope it does."

Through anecdotal and sometimes wry humor, moments of seriousness, and slide images of her ever-evolving work, Ringgold described her progression as an artist, teacher, parent, daughter, activist and author. The illustrated survey lecture spanned nearly 40 years of her career.

Her early oil paintings reflected the pop art movement and the civil rights activism of the 1960s. Although schooled in the tradition of the European masters, black American artists increasingly influenced her work. She soon found her own creative identity - a compilation of her formal training, African heritage and experiences as an African-American woman. During this time she became an activist for both female and black artists whose works were excluded from museums and galleries.

Ringgold made political statements by adding words to her paintings, often subtly because political art was not in vogue at the time. "I didn't want my audience to see it right away. ... You wanted them to see it from a distance, and then to come close and then you wanted them to see it. And so they did and a lot of them didn't like it."

"This did not help me [as an artist] in a lot of ways," Ringgold added, dryly. "But I did not silence my voice." The freedom to speak, which is crucial to art, does make America special, she noted later in her talk.

In the 70s Ringgold began making acrylic paintings on canvas with fabric borders, a form she borrowed from Tibetan tankas. Her mother, Willi Posey Jones, made the pliant frames by piecing fabric together in quilt-like fashion. Seeing the asymmetry of Jones' patchwork borders Ringgold thought, " 'She's ruining my work. What is she doing?' And now I'm so glad that she did that and I'm so glad that I kept my mouth shut," Ringgold said.

Her work also had expanded to include fabric dolls and African-inspired hooded masks using painted canvas, beads and embroidery. Together, these things marked a transition from traditional painter to fiber artist and led to works she would become most known for.

In 1980 Ringgold wrote an autobiography that she couldn't get published. But she had a story, and so she used art to tell it. Initially she performed for audiences wearing her African masks. The same year she collaborated with her mother on her first quilt, "Echoes of Harlem," before Jones' death in 1981. The daughter painted on small pieces of canvas, applying thin washes of acrylic, which her mother sewed together. A few years later, Ringgold began adding handwritten text to her quilted images and the "story quilt" was born.

"I began writing on my art because I was going to get published one way or another," she said. Through the '80s and into the '90s the artist made entire story-quilt series. Along the way she adapted some works into about a dozen children's books, including her first in 1991, "Tar Beach," from the "Woman on a Bridge Series." The book is based on her childhood experiences in Harlem.

Longtime Ringgold fan Yolande Scott toted a luggage cart on wheels full of books for the artist to sign following the lecture. The native Richmonder felt the drive to Sweet Briar was just a "hop, skip and a jump" to see such an outstanding fiber artist.

"She started out as a painter and this [story quilting] medium has become her muse. Everything is so vivid, it reaches out to old and young alike. The whole imagery of the quilt is as a cloth of comfort for the spirit, culturally and emotionally. The quilt has such important meaning to the African-American culture because it came from need - from rags to artwork," Scott said.

Ringgold works from her studio in Englewood, N.J. She is professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. She started her career teaching art in New York City public schools and continues to paint and publish children's books.

For more information and to see images of her work, visit www.faithringgold.com.