Lot Essay
"Anyone can fly. All you need is somewhere to go to that you can’t get to any other way." - Faith Ringgold
Faith Ringgold’s Tar Beach II (1990-92), a seminal work from her mature period, powerfully conveys the artist’s metaphysical flight to freedom via eight-year-old Cassie’s flight across the Harlem skyline plotted onto a story quilt. Set in Harlem in 1939, Cassie, an autobiographical avatar for Ringgold, dreams of flying through the hot summer night. Depicting Cassie first reposing with her family on their tar beach—apartment building rooftops which provide refuge from the heat—then flying through the sky, claiming the George Washington Bridge for herself and the Union Building for her father, Tar Beach II works against what Ringgold terms the ‘adultification’ of the Black child by asserting childhood as a pivotal, transitory developmental period where ever-changing environments test and reshape boundaries.
Ringgold’s story quilting emerged from her early success painting the cultural politics of the midcentury, wherein she constructed a vision for recognition, representation, and reform by openly addressing racial discrimination through subjects including segregation and police brutality. Ringgold operated within the Civil Rights Movement and in tandem with Black Power, yet continually kept faith in a future of racial equality. Her masterpiece mural American People Series #20: Die (1967), hanging in the Museum of Modern Art, encapsulates her stance, most notably in the mural’s center, where a Black girl and a white boy clutch each other in terror amid a scene of violence wrought by racial oppression. Tar Beach II in an evolution of Die’s conceit within a more introspective lens, maintaining Ringgold’s optimistic vision of future liberation. She elaborates her childhood motif in Cassie, who operates as a conduit for Ringgold’s own aspirations.
Tar Beach II is an emphatically significant series within Ringgold’s oeuvre, evidenced by the many prestigious institutions which hold examples of the work in their permanent collections: the Columbus Museum of art, the Delaware Art Museum, the Montclair Art Museum, the SCAD Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The series synthesizes Ringgold’s early experimentations into a cohesive compositional resolution which Ringgold continues to probe into her late career. In her first series, American People Series (1963-67), executed with oil on canvas, Ringgold perfects her figurative style, which she terms ‘Super Realism.’ Flat, emblematic figures allow her scenes to read symbolically, with characters representative of more than mere records of individuals or specific events. Ringgold started incorporating text into her Black Light Series (1968-69) and her posters from the 1970s and 1980s advocating for Black feminism, initiating Ringgold’s interest pursing prose. The artist concurrently developed her practice of incorporating textile into her painted works, as in her Feminist Series (1972-1993) and Windows of the Wedding series (1974), where she framed painted canvases in patterned fabric. Ringgold’s first story quilts in the early 1980s are the first amalgamation of text, textile, and figure in a single work—a combination of media and motifs which Ringgold had first explored discretely. Tar Beach II demonstrates the cumulative effort of this synthesis through her incorporation of a literary element to the series. Going beyond the incorporation of text onto quilt, Ringgold wrote and published her first book Tar Beach (Crown Publishers, 1991) in tandem with the Tar Beach II series, accomplishing a definitive gesamtkunstwerk unifying Ringgold’s artistic interests into a singular work of art. Tar Beach II has gone on to inform Ringgold’s later career as well as a whole generation of artists, as described by Diedrick Brackens: “alongside my contemporaries—folks like April Bey, Devin N. Morris, Bisa Butler, Ebony G. Patterson, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby—I am animated by her practice” (D. Brackens, “The Soft Library of Faith,” Faith Ringgold: American People, Phaidon Press, New York, 2022, pg. 163).
Ringgold began quilting 1980 with Echoes of Harlem, a collaboration with her mother, the couture designer Willi Posey. Ringgold viewed her quilting process as a continuation of her painting, stating: “I am a painter who works in the quilt medium. It’s still a painting… I am not really a quilt maker” quoted in L. R. Lippard, “Hot from Her Soul: Faith Ringgold’s Art Activism,” op. cit., pg. 11). Ringgold embraced the subversive possibilities of the feminine-coded medium, which allowed for crafting oppression-defying stories evoking the African American oral tradition. In Ringgold’s family, quilting knowledge passed from mother to daughter, stretching back to her great-great-grandmother Susie Shannon, an expert weaver. For Ringgold, quilting was “so intimately connected with women’s lives, [it] could become a most efficient vehicle for telling the stories of their lives” (F. Ringgold, quoted in Z. Whitley, “Summoning Ancestors, Inspiring Descendants: Faith Ringgold and Literature,” op. cit., pg. 146). Ringgold uses fragments of African cloth which she collected over years to frame with quilt, weaving designs redolent of her cultural heritage into the tableau.
Ringgold first approached the tar beach subject in Woman on a Bridge #1 of 5: Tar Beach, now in the Guggenheim Museum, where she shows a similar Harlem scene to Tar Beach II, with Cassie flying over the George Washington Bridge, courageously confronting a symbol of masculinity. Ringgold then created Tar Beach II and her multi-award-winning children’s novel Tar Beach simultaneously whilst undergoing a residency at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, both sharing Cassie’s story. The curator Zoé Whitley asserts that “in many ways, Tar Beach II, more than the original quilt, served as the model for what would become the children’s book” (op. cit., 147).
Tar Beach II is a powerful encapsulation of Ringgold’s progressive vision, blending the political content of her previous mural paintings within a medium resonating with the material mastery passed down to the artist by her maternal ancestors. Through a mélange of the political and the personal, Ringgold compellingly articulates her desire for liberation in this capstone of her body of work.
Faith Ringgold’s Tar Beach II (1990-92), a seminal work from her mature period, powerfully conveys the artist’s metaphysical flight to freedom via eight-year-old Cassie’s flight across the Harlem skyline plotted onto a story quilt. Set in Harlem in 1939, Cassie, an autobiographical avatar for Ringgold, dreams of flying through the hot summer night. Depicting Cassie first reposing with her family on their tar beach—apartment building rooftops which provide refuge from the heat—then flying through the sky, claiming the George Washington Bridge for herself and the Union Building for her father, Tar Beach II works against what Ringgold terms the ‘adultification’ of the Black child by asserting childhood as a pivotal, transitory developmental period where ever-changing environments test and reshape boundaries.
Ringgold’s story quilting emerged from her early success painting the cultural politics of the midcentury, wherein she constructed a vision for recognition, representation, and reform by openly addressing racial discrimination through subjects including segregation and police brutality. Ringgold operated within the Civil Rights Movement and in tandem with Black Power, yet continually kept faith in a future of racial equality. Her masterpiece mural American People Series #20: Die (1967), hanging in the Museum of Modern Art, encapsulates her stance, most notably in the mural’s center, where a Black girl and a white boy clutch each other in terror amid a scene of violence wrought by racial oppression. Tar Beach II in an evolution of Die’s conceit within a more introspective lens, maintaining Ringgold’s optimistic vision of future liberation. She elaborates her childhood motif in Cassie, who operates as a conduit for Ringgold’s own aspirations.
Tar Beach II is an emphatically significant series within Ringgold’s oeuvre, evidenced by the many prestigious institutions which hold examples of the work in their permanent collections: the Columbus Museum of art, the Delaware Art Museum, the Montclair Art Museum, the SCAD Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The series synthesizes Ringgold’s early experimentations into a cohesive compositional resolution which Ringgold continues to probe into her late career. In her first series, American People Series (1963-67), executed with oil on canvas, Ringgold perfects her figurative style, which she terms ‘Super Realism.’ Flat, emblematic figures allow her scenes to read symbolically, with characters representative of more than mere records of individuals or specific events. Ringgold started incorporating text into her Black Light Series (1968-69) and her posters from the 1970s and 1980s advocating for Black feminism, initiating Ringgold’s interest pursing prose. The artist concurrently developed her practice of incorporating textile into her painted works, as in her Feminist Series (1972-1993) and Windows of the Wedding series (1974), where she framed painted canvases in patterned fabric. Ringgold’s first story quilts in the early 1980s are the first amalgamation of text, textile, and figure in a single work—a combination of media and motifs which Ringgold had first explored discretely. Tar Beach II demonstrates the cumulative effort of this synthesis through her incorporation of a literary element to the series. Going beyond the incorporation of text onto quilt, Ringgold wrote and published her first book Tar Beach (Crown Publishers, 1991) in tandem with the Tar Beach II series, accomplishing a definitive gesamtkunstwerk unifying Ringgold’s artistic interests into a singular work of art. Tar Beach II has gone on to inform Ringgold’s later career as well as a whole generation of artists, as described by Diedrick Brackens: “alongside my contemporaries—folks like April Bey, Devin N. Morris, Bisa Butler, Ebony G. Patterson, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby—I am animated by her practice” (D. Brackens, “The Soft Library of Faith,” Faith Ringgold: American People, Phaidon Press, New York, 2022, pg. 163).
Ringgold began quilting 1980 with Echoes of Harlem, a collaboration with her mother, the couture designer Willi Posey. Ringgold viewed her quilting process as a continuation of her painting, stating: “I am a painter who works in the quilt medium. It’s still a painting… I am not really a quilt maker” quoted in L. R. Lippard, “Hot from Her Soul: Faith Ringgold’s Art Activism,” op. cit., pg. 11). Ringgold embraced the subversive possibilities of the feminine-coded medium, which allowed for crafting oppression-defying stories evoking the African American oral tradition. In Ringgold’s family, quilting knowledge passed from mother to daughter, stretching back to her great-great-grandmother Susie Shannon, an expert weaver. For Ringgold, quilting was “so intimately connected with women’s lives, [it] could become a most efficient vehicle for telling the stories of their lives” (F. Ringgold, quoted in Z. Whitley, “Summoning Ancestors, Inspiring Descendants: Faith Ringgold and Literature,” op. cit., pg. 146). Ringgold uses fragments of African cloth which she collected over years to frame with quilt, weaving designs redolent of her cultural heritage into the tableau.
Ringgold first approached the tar beach subject in Woman on a Bridge #1 of 5: Tar Beach, now in the Guggenheim Museum, where she shows a similar Harlem scene to Tar Beach II, with Cassie flying over the George Washington Bridge, courageously confronting a symbol of masculinity. Ringgold then created Tar Beach II and her multi-award-winning children’s novel Tar Beach simultaneously whilst undergoing a residency at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, both sharing Cassie’s story. The curator Zoé Whitley asserts that “in many ways, Tar Beach II, more than the original quilt, served as the model for what would become the children’s book” (op. cit., 147).
Tar Beach II is a powerful encapsulation of Ringgold’s progressive vision, blending the political content of her previous mural paintings within a medium resonating with the material mastery passed down to the artist by her maternal ancestors. Through a mélange of the political and the personal, Ringgold compellingly articulates her desire for liberation in this capstone of her body of work.