Faith Ringgold (1930-2024). Tar Beach 2, 1990. Quilted screenprint in colors on silk and cotton with pieced fabric borde...

Description

Faith Ringgold (1930-2024)
Tar Beach 2, 1990
Quilted screenprint in colors on silk and cotton with pieced fabric borders
65-1/2 x 65-1/2 inches (166.4 x 166.4 cm)
Ed. 16/24 (aside from 7 artist's proofs)
Signed, editioned, and inscribed in ink lower right quadrant; additionally inscribed in ink on the reverse
Quilted by Gail Fisher-Liebig, La Jolla, California
Printed by The Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia

PROVENANCE:
AARP Corporate Collection;
Acquired by the present owner from the above.

There is a softness to Tar Beach 2 that goes beyond fabric and thread. It is the kind of softness that remembers you - your weight, your dreams, your story - and holds them all gently in return. Faith Ringgold's textile works have always done this: offered comfort without erasing complexity, beauty without denying struggle. In Tar Beach 2, that embrace is literal. We are wrapped not just in quilted cloth, but in memory, in flight, in possibility.

The work belongs to Ringgold's Story Quilt series - hybrid pieces that fuse painting, silkscreen, text, and hand-stitched quilting, often in collaboration with women in her family and community. It is this layered, collaborative process that gives Tar Beach 2 its extraordinary warmth. The central image, screenprinted and hand-colored, was adapted from her 1991 children's book Tar Beach, which itself grew out of her original 1988 quilt of the same name. Around the printed panel, a patchwork of fabric is carefully sewn, recalling the traditions of Black American quilting as both a communal act and a radical archive.

"I will always remember when the stars fell down around me and lifted me up above the George Washington Bridge" says Cassie Louise Lightfoot, Ringgold's luminous young narrator, who is depicted soaring above the rooftops of Harlem on a star-speckled summer night. Below her, the George Washington Bridge cuts across the city skyline, the Union Building thrusts into the sky, and the rest of Harlem crowds the middle ground with its maze of buildings, windows illuminated in the night, hinting at lives lived behind glass panes. Cassie's arms are outstretched above - her body light, unburdened. In Ringgold's visual language, flight is never fantasy for its own sake; it is escape, ownership; it is freedom remade through imagination when systems on the ground deny it.

The title Tar Beach refers to the hot, black rooftop where Cassie's family gathers to eat, talk, and dream - a common practice for working-class families in Harlem without access to yards or air conditioning. But even more so, "Tar Beach" becomes a metaphor for making joy out of limitation, for reimagining one's environment as a launchpad rather than a boundary. Ringgold takes that modest rooftop and transforms it into sacred space: part sanctuary, part stage, part ladder to the sky.

Like all of Ringgold's best works, Tar Beach 2 does not flatten its themes into slogans. It remains personal, intimate. The stitching is deliberate, the colors radiant. Every fabric panel is carefully selected. And while the image glows with childlike wonder, it carries with it the weight of generations - women who stitched and cooked and marched and taught, who were grounded but never grounded. Their voices echo through Ringgold's: measured, tender, and fiercely imaginative.

To stand before Tar Beach 2 is to feel the distance between earth and sky collapse. It asks us not only to remember where we came from, but to dream of where we might go next - and to understand that both are stitched from the same cloth. Ringgold does not simply depict freedom; she quilts it. She prints it. She writes it into the warp and weft. And somehow, most tenderly and thoughtfully, she lets it wrap around us, comfort us, and lets us carry it along our own journey.


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