In creating her story quilts, she combines painting, patchwork quilting, and sequential images. In the 1970s, she took an interest in fabric and textiles and achieved recognition for her story quilts. However, her career as a professional artist can be traced back to the mid-1950s when she began creating oil paintings. She received both a Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration and a Caldecott Honor Award for the book. The publication of Faith Ringgold’s Tar Beach in 1991 launched her career as a children’s author, and it was an auspicious debut. The song is about escaping the “hustling crowd” and “rat race noise” by climbing “up to the top of the stairs” and spending time in the “trouble proof” space “up on the roof.” This summary of the song equally applies to Ringgold’s Tar Beach, but Ringgold’s story goes beyond the theme of escape to explore ideas of imagination and empowerment.
In that moment, I was reminded of an old Motown hit by The Drifters called “Up on the Roof” that I listened to when I was young. Wanting the students to experience this picture book in the same way that young children usually do, I opened the book and started reading out-loud about eight-year-old Cassie Louise Lightfoot and her love of spending time on the roof of the tenement building where she lives with her family.
I was looking at Ringgold’s two Tar Beach quilts when I flashed back to a graduate seminar I taught on urban children’s literature, where I devoted an entire class session to picture books set in cities, including Ringgold’s Tar Beach. I recently visited Faith Ringgold: American People, the New Museum’s retrospective exhibit of Ringgold’s art. He is especially interested urban children’s literature. West is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he teaches courses in children’s and young adult literature. Claiming New York in Faith Ringgold’s Tar Beach
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