"Sunning Myself on Tar Beach" by Brittany K. Allen
When I was little, my mother read us many books in which dreamy, distractible children flew perfectly nice coops. I guess this plot point is par for the genre—Oz, Narnia, Wonderland—but before the chapter books, came the miniature epics like Faith Ringgold’s Tar Beach. Tar Beach follows two Harlem kids who leave their parent’s rooftop picnic to go for a joy-fly over the George Washington Bridge. It had special heft in our evening rotation not least, I suspect, because it was one of just a handful of children’s books starring subjects who looked like my siblings and I.
I remembered this book—or more aptly, the soporific state of just before bedtime when you are seven or eight years old, milked-up and covered in itchy flannel PJs—when I was confronted by its cover at the New Museum. That crooked column on the Bowery is now playing host to Faith Ringgold’s first-ever career retrospective—an exhibit expansively titled “American People.” And it’s splendid, this exhibit. Not every retrospective leaves you with the impression that you know the artist, might even be able to recognize her laugh across a crowded party. I chalk this up to a coherence of both curation and also Ringgold’s artistic inquiry, which strikes me as uniquely consistent even when it shifts shape.
On every plaque, Ringgold is described as ideologically staunch. This makes sense given that in addition to being an artist and a teacher, she was an organizer—a side gallery summarizes her work with assorted Black feminist and revolutionary groups including the Women Students & Artists for Black Liberation group, the Ad Hoc Women’s Artist Committee, and the Women Artists in Revolution. Moving through the galleries, it’s clear that her politics don’t just frame the work, they flood it. From her early, lurid figure paintings (think ghoulish, under-lit faces, think Weimar-era expressionism) to the engulfing quilts she’s perhaps best known for, the love for her mostly Black, mainly joyful subjects is palpable—clear, precise, abundant.
The work becomes more personal as years pass. Where her “American People” series (1963-1967) depicts grey-faced bogeymen—which is to say, symbols of systemic injustice more than individuals—the quilts she worried in the 80s and 90s tend to feel like diary entries, lifted from or narrated by some cheeky, particular ‘I.’ As in the “Dear Melissa,” series, in which an ex-pat artist floats questions to an aunt via illustrated letters. Questions like “Can I be an artist and a wife?” and “Should I paint some of the great and tragic issues of our world?” hint at the quilter’s own preoccupations. In one caption from this series, Ringgold explains her art as a function of liberatory politics when her subject writes:
You asked me once why I wanted to be an artist and I said I didn’t know. Well I know now. It is because it’s the only way I know of being free.
The fact that Ringgold’s aesthetic is as unambiguous as the content she wrestles with was especially exciting to me. A plaque tells me that when her work wasn’t deemed sufficiently fashionable to gain her entry to the Spiral Group (a vanguard club of Black artists founded by Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis), she only doubled down on her chosen medium of fabric and thread. And in a moment when other Black artists were reaching for abstraction, Ringgold doggedly stayed depicting people. Their faces, their bedrooms, their intricate domestic dances, these held her attention. Staring at the “Church Picnic,” it also strikes me that the quilt as medium is no coincidence. That much of her work is rendered on objects connoting coziness, warmth, femininity—as opposed to the drawn and quartered canvas—underlines the affirming quality. That love for the bodies contained. Yes, her subjects seem to murmur in my direction, you are welcome here. You personally, in all your colored splendor.
There’s not much attempt to lend depth to the world with tricks of perspective in Ringgold’s quilts. Her flat style contrives to keep the viewer in a bald relation to illusion: what you see is unmistakably what you get. Yet the horizontal space is filled to bursting; there’s an outrageous level of detail in the caption text, in the faces. Contending with her story quilts, I’m forced to wonder why Western art has historically valued depth over width. There may be no shadows here to help create the illusion of breathing flesh, yet this two-dimensional work feels so very alive.
What is it about shadows, anyway? Why do we equate them with nuance? Noting their general absence from these galleries, I was reminded of another children’s story. Peter Pan, the Mary Martin version—a VHS I watched to ribbons. I remember singing along to “I Gotta Crow” at my grandma’s house. San Antonio summers between 1999 and 2004. I stitch together the objects that old scene is made of: pilled red sofa, glass-top coffee table, spoiled dogs panting on the kitchen floor. This house is empty now. As a kid I remember finding something disturbing in the idea that a shadow could be divorced from a body, and also sewn back on—as Wendy does for Peter, when that young crook breaks into her bedroom. To have no shadow is to feel naked. But it is also, perhaps, to feel light. Light enough, in Peter and Cassie Louise’s cases, to fly. Does it follow then that to be untethered is to be obvious?
Standing in front of the itch-inducing “Die,” a painting Ringgold made in homage to the bloody summer of 1967, I note that the presence of shading is not tantamount to the presence of complexity. “Die” is difficult to look at. It depicts a moment of violence, in jarring, frightful colors. Brown and pink faces flail, abject with terror and confusion. (Think blood-spattered children. Think frozen screams.) It occurs to me later that the eerie effectiveness of this painting, the way it stamps in the brain like a nightmare despite the cartoonish flatness, makes sense considering some complicated things are also very obvious. Many codified kinds of hatred, for instance. Much violence. Love, birth, death.
In the gallery containing Tar Beach, I spy a mother and child. Or possibly: a grandmother and child. (It’s hard to say with the masks on.) The child announces herself from the jump as precocious. In a slightly louder than museum-friendly voice, she asks her elder questions about the art, especially that one piece in the corner that features a male nude. As her elder gently, tactfully explains that bodies can be artistic, too and we mustn’t laugh because we’re all the same underneath our clothes, I put this child at eight or nine. With her braids, and her cheeky chatterbox, she reminds me of myself at this age, and the patient mother figure reminds me of my own mother and grandmothers. (Or anyway, I’m inclined to sentimentalize them so.)
They get to Tar Beach and the woman reads the caption aloud: “I will always remember when the stars fell down around me, and lifted me up above the George Washington Bridge.” I look at them looking at the quilt. Through their eyes I see the familiar black rooftop, hedged with clothesline. The picnic table with the juicy watermelon, potatoes in a bowl. The adults playing cards and the children, flat beside them, staring sideways at the skyline. You can almost smell it. The little girl peers at the picture. Her brow is furrowed above the fabric mask. “Cassie Louise Lightfoot,” she says, reading. “That’s a good name.” Then ambles on, good-naturedly to the next room of cozy things.
A prayer here for all distractible children, capable of flight. Some days I wish I could remember more of my childhood. The milk-fed time of forced perspective, when the world was as bright as these colorful squares. Other days I’m excited by the prospect of one day leading a little one around a museum like this. Telling someone smaller that our bodies can be artistic. Saying “I’ve got you covered,” as my elders did for me.
Brittany K. Allen is a Brooklyn-based writer and performer. Her prose appears or is forthcoming in Catapult, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Kenyon Review Online, and Longreads, among other places, and her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her stage plays have been produced and developed at The Public Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Portland Center Stage, and elsewhere, and she's the recipient of the 2021 Daryl Roth Creative Spirit Award, and the 2021 Dramatists Guild Foundation Georgia Engel Prize for Comedic Playwriting. Her writing has been supported by residencies at MacDowell and SPACE on Ryder Farm, and scholarships to both Bread Loaf and the Sewanee Writers Conference. The winner of Epiphany's inaugural Fresh Voices Fellowship, she is currently working on her first novel.
