Faith Ringgold: Woman on a Bridge #1 of 5: Tar Beach

In this episode of 'Why'd They Put That in a Museum,' hosts Sarah Lees, a museum curator and researcher, and Beth Bacon, an avid museum goer and children's book author, discuss Faith Ringgold's 'Tar Beach,' which is a part of her 'Woman on a Bridge' series. This colorful work defies categorization. It blends painting, quilting, and storytelling. It’s an artwork… and also a Caldecott-winning picture book. We start by talking about the quilt version of the work in the New York Guggenheim, which shows a family hanging out on a New York City rooftop on a summer evening. We talk about the work’s magical and fantastic elements (it depicts a girl, Cassie Louise Lightfoot, flying in a starlit sky above the George Washington Bridge). Its text mentions both heart wrenching political messages and the hope that's born in the imagination. Why did the Guggenheim Museum choose this piece for their collection? To answer that, we explore Ringgold's influences from Tibeten thangka, to African-American quiltmaking, to abstract expressionism. We also go back to look at her career, starting in the 1960’s and her insistence that her work is worth preserving and valuing. We talk about how the personal can be political. And we ponder other works, such as ‘The Flag Is Bleeding’ and ‘Die’ which is featured at MOMA, in honored place next to Picasso’s ‘Demoiselles D’Avignon.’ Why did MOMA put a Ringgold work next to a Picasso? Listen to the podcast and find out. 

© 2025 Why'd They Put That In A Museum podcast hosts Beth Bacon and Sarah Lees.

Transcript

Faith Ringgold: Woman on a Bridge Number One of Five

Sarah Lees: Thanks for joining us on this episode of Why'd They Put That in a Museum, the podcast where we explore objects found in museums. 

Beth Bacon:  Hello. Hi, Sarah. 

Sarah Lees: Hey, Beth. I'm Sarah Lees, a museum curator and researcher, 

Beth Bacon: I am Beth Bacon. an avid museum goer and an author of books for young readers. Sarah, what are we talking about today? 

Sarah Lees: So today's topic is a really fabulous work by the artist Faith Ringgold. And the title of it is Woman on a Bridge Number One of Five. Tar Beach. A story quilt. 

Beth Bacon: I love it. Cool.

Sarah Lees: And we should point out, just amazingly by coincidence, this is just a week after Faith Ringgold just passed away.I think she was about 93.  And we had already planned to talk about this work, so it's hopefully kind of a tribute to her, and to an amazing career that I hope we can do justice to, because She has done so, so much. Beth, do you want to start talking about Tar Beach, the quilt? 

Beth Bacon: Sure. I actually, by profession, am a children's book author. And I came to this quilt through the picture book version of it. It's a storybook quilt. So there's, it's made out of cloth, but it also has words on it. And those words were made into a children's book. So I just find that really fascinating that it is the same work in different media. 

Sarah Lees: And that's actually kind of a key point for Ringgold as well. Maybe we can start with, start with the object. So, the actual quilt itself is currently in the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which I think would be Guggenheim.org. The full title is Woman on a Bridge Number One of Five. So there are five quotes in this series, subtitled Tar Beach. It was made in 1988.

Hopefully you can go see it in person because I have to say, There is no substitute for the in-person experience. What we're looking at is basically a piece of canvas, a piece of square canvas, I should say. It's about, I think it's about six feet by six feet, one of the facts of this object is it's not like a stretched canvas on a set. frame, it's actually a piece of fabric.

So the central image is this piece of painted canvas, but it's surrounded by a border of what you think of as a quilt. So they're different pieces of fabric, little squares kind of stitched together. Then, as you said, there's actually some text panels, top and bottom, where Ringgold has written the full text of the narrative, and then more fabric around the edges.

So it's this really multi level object. And then I should say, even the central canvas has stitching over it. as you would see in a quilt. One of the really interesting qualities about Ringgold's work is just how varied it is. I mean, it's hard to know whether to call this a painting or a quilt, you know, or a book.

Or a book. Right. One of her goals in the work that she did was to make objects that kind of defied categorization. Because she was trained in kind of the traditional manner of an art student. She got a master's in visual art in 1959. So imagine, you know, how traditional that education was. And I feel like ever since then, she tried to find ways to It's to kind of work against or subvert all that traditional training that she had, you know.

So a painting didn't have to be on a fixed piece of canvas. It could be on fabric. It didn't have to be a mythological scene from Greek mythology. It could be, in this case, about, people that Ringgold knew or people like people she knew, you know, in her own, in Neighborhood. 

Beth Bacon: Let's talk about the image on the quilts. It's a picture of people on a rooftop in New York City, and you can see a bridge in the background and other tall buildings, and it's at nighttime. You can see the sky with stars in it. And the sky is sort of bluish nighttime sky. And Sarah, you live in New York and I used to live in New York and I remember loving to go up to the roof of my five story walk up in the summer and get some fresh air and look at the stars and the skyline. It's magical. 

Sarah Lees: Just see the sky. And that's, we should say, the concept of tar beach, I don't know when it came up. I feel like it was from the 20s or 30s or something. If you live in New York City, nowhere near a beach, although not that far. In the middle of the summertime, you went up to the roof, which is usually covered with tar paper, right? Um, to get some fresh air, like you said. And so that's why this idea of tar beach for the term, came about. So that's what we're seeing in this image, right? Is there some grownups sitting around a table having a meal. and then two children lying on a blanket next to them, just like stargazing, getting fresh air. There's some laundry there at the edge. What else? Some plants, you know, it looks like a really nice place to hang. 

Beth Bacon: You can see in the blue sky with the stars, there are figures of people flying around. Yeah. And those are the, the girl and her sibling lying around up in the sky. And if you read the words.

The flying is her magical space. It's her imagination. It's her possibilities. It's her saying that like the physical circumstances that I'm in right now, aren't necessarily everything about my life. I've got this giant imaginative, creative life that is rich and valuable. 

Sarah Lees: So. The girl is an eight year old. Her name is Cassie Louise Lightfoot, an evocative name, right, given that she's flying. Part of the text is really powerful. It says, I'm paraphrasing, that once Cassie flies over the bridge, She has gained her freedom and it means that she can go anywhere she wants now. She's like, the world is hers. Really powerful concept of making space where there isn't any, or finding, you know, opportunity, and just making it your own, you can find a video of Ringgold reading the whole story. I think the version that I found happened to be on MoMA's website, but definitely go look for that. 

Beth Bacon: It's all about possibility.The other thing she says about the bridge is that like, she possesses it. It's like her possession and she claims it and it's like a jeweled necklace. And I just think that that's such a really cool thing. It's like a public object, the George Washington Bridge. And she's like, this is mine. And I fly over it. Allowing people to have that hope and possibility in their imagination. I live in Saint Louis now and I live across the street from a park and it's this beautiful park and I walk in every day. And I always think like, “I'm going to just imagine this is my front yard, and I have just invited everyone in the city to join me in my front yard.” And it's, it's just, I don't know, a kind of a funny, weird imagination thing that I say to myself to make myself feel like. You know, why, why wouldn't it? It literally is in front of my house. And the rest of the public is available to see it. And if I was rich enough to have this land, I would love to invite the public to it. Anyways, I'm a grown up, you know, and this is like a child having these thoughts. And I think that having a hopeful and wide imaginative life is important for everybody. And that's what this piece is inviting. 

Sarah Lees: Right. I just want to point out as well that this is just the tip of the iceberg of Ringgold's work. This story, Tar Beach, is kind of In a way about the personal being political, right? I mean, it's taking something about a young girl's very personal life, and making a much broader statement. A lot of Ringgold's work was far more explicitly political and super engaged with a lot of issues happening at the time because, as I said, she started off as an artist in 1959. She began painting in the 60s, of course, a time of tremendous political ferment and activity. And the work that she made explicitly critiqued racism and sexism. 

Just for example, one of her paintings from 1967 is titled The Flag is Bleeding. So it is an image of the American flag and there are black and white figures, I think, two men and a woman in there. Another painting that's In MoMA, at this point, is simply called Die, and it basically shows, like, some kind of riot or mass shooting. So, her work is so, so powerful. If she was anti establishment, how did her work become respected and shown by the establishment?

The painting called Die was first shown in a gallery because there's a bit more opportunity there. It wasn't a commercial gallery. I think it was like a nonprofit, which means it's a bit easier to get your work shown. People at the time acknowledged. The significance of this work because it was really open-ended. It didn't, sort of condemn one side or the other. It just essentially painted a picture of how much conflict there was in the U. S. at that time around race and violence and misogyny as well. It took some time before these kinds of. Works of Ringgold's did enter a museum. Interestingly, by 1988, she was kind of well into mid-career.

In 1988, when Tar Beach was made, the Guggenheim acquired it that same year. So by then, she had already been pretty well established. but the earlier paintings, the one that's currently in MoMA. They only acquired that, I think, in 2016 or so. Yeah, 2016. And when they did a reinstallation in 2019 is when I first even became aware that Ringgold had made this kind of political work.So that is a pretty long lag, if I'm right, for people to become aware of. just how politically engaged her work has been. I guess the other thing to say about the work on fabric, like the quilts and things, is that that idea came to her in 1980. She made her first quilt. and she did it in collaboration with her mother who had been a dressmaker and fashion designer.

She also drew inspiration from a Tibetan art form called a thangker, which are images painted on fabric that also have sort of richly brocaded or embroidered patterns. borders. She's looking to tradition outside the European norm and bringing that into her work. And of course, quilting had a long and deep history in the African American community.

Quilts were often something, first of all, it was a collective activity that usually women pursued. So there's, I was going to say a feminist basis, but that's not even it. It's just, it's a tradition that is, you know, centered with women. The quilts were often made Not just for, the families of these African American women, but of course, for, the people who enslaved them, 

Beth Bacon: I think the concept of a story quilt is  also part of that tradition using this, the quilt to tell a story. 

Sarah Lees: Historically quilts have been just literally pieces of fabric stitched together, right, but, and the stories kind of emerged from the names of the patterns. I think there were some called rooftops, there were some called, you know, wanders, because the quilts I mean, they are abstract art. If you put a quilt on the wall, the colors, the shapes, are purely abstract, which is interesting to think of at the same time that, you know, the abstract expressionists in New York, like Jackson Pollock and all, were very high profile.

There's not a lot of distance, distance between, you know, a man's flinging paint around and a quilt that is equally abstract in terms of the form. But, Ringgold, one of her ideas was to literally put the text on the surface of the quilt. She said something about like, this was the only way that she could, make her words explicit was to put them literally on the surface of the quilt.

Beth Bacon: As a writer, she gets right into the voice of the girl and into the emotions. 

Sarah Lees: Yeah, and it's as if Cassie is speaking, right? It's not third person, right? It's first person, I think. 

Beth Bacon: And then she gets a little bit into the political, where they fly over the union building where the father's working. Right, yeah. And it says, he still can't join the union because grandpa wasn't a member. It doesn't explain anything more than that, but there's a whole lot of politics and it's just mentioned really, really superficially here. And then it's on to saying that, that, you know, but daddy will be rich 1 day and she then flies over the ice cream store. And so, like, it's just so interesting how, like, all these, like, super heavy political messages are ingrained with the kids dreams. And a kid's understanding of it all. 

Sarah Lees: She had for so long sort of fought these battles. Tar Beach is kind of reflection of how it affects even children, right? Even though their understanding is incomplete, these kinds of systemic pressures and forces affect everyone.

Beth Bacon: Yeah. And the force of hope and imagination can break through that. 

Sarah Lees: Yeah. 

Beth Bacon: I think that also let's in this podcast, just admit. Both you and I, Sarah are white women in our late fifties and we're American. so this is, not a heritage that we experienced and to some extent, maybe her putting it in this child's voice,  is like introducing it to to that part of the American population that didn't experience this, introduce it to us in a simplistic way, maybe, and maybe even a safe way. It is kind of vulnerable to even talk about this, but I actually think it's really important for, for me to talk about this. And. What do you think about that? 

Sarah Lees: The thing that strikes me is just how long it took for me. And I think a lot of people to understand the depth and power of somebody like Faith Ringgold. I knew of her, I had heard her name, but. As I said, it wasn't until 2019, when MoMA decided to give her painting Pride of Place next to a Picasso, this was my first realization. You know, and that's almost embarrassing, because I like to think that I am fairly well informed, but there's so much that I don't know.

Beth Bacon: So her painting—

Sarah Lees: Die.

Beth Bacon: … is next to a Picasso. Picasso is world-known, putting something next to a Picasso is such an honored spot. Why do you think MoMA put it there? 

Sarah Lees: Ringgold was inspired in part by Picasso, specifically his painting called Guernica from 1937, which was an image, drawn from the Spanish civil war, where the town of Guernica was bombed by the fascist forces of Franco. It shows, you know, women and children running from burning buildings. It's a very powerful Picasso. Uh, Ringgold, I think said it was her favorite work by him. Die is meant to show a similarly kind of graphically violent moment. Now that it's at MoMA, please do go to their website and call up an image of it.

The background is actually just gridded gray blocks of color. And then these very brightly colored figures, men, women, children, black and white are painted over it. Over this grid. So it's explicitly, acknowledging abstract art, Picasso, in terms of his image of terror, really, and violence.

Guernica, actually, for a period of time, was in MoMA, which I think is where Ringgold saw it. It's back in Spain. There's a whole story there, but partly because, the fascist regime was finally defeated. So that is why MoMA installed Ringgold's painting next to the Demoiselle d'Avignon, a different Picasso painting.

It acknowledges both the inspiration that Ringgold drew from the work and also how She challenged it, expanded the meaning, and brought it up to really the present day. I mean, if we think about gun violence, racial violence now, it, her work is so relevant and up to the minute and still  powerful. I keep using that word, but it is.

Beth Bacon: It reaches you emotionally just by looking at it. It's sort of visual beauty and Strength, but then also the power of, the content. It's a picture of destruction. I think it's really interesting that you're talking about where the items are placed in museum, because that might also be why they put things in a museum, how things relate to each other.

So there's the physical object and its message and colors and all that. And then there's the sort of artist background that brought all that together to make that one work. Then on top of that, there's this whole like extra level of meaning of, of the, the paintings next to each other in a museum. 

Sarah Lees: Dare I say that's curatorial voice, right? That's the person who, who, you know, came up with the installation, generally the curator, trying to make these connections. 

Beth Bacon: And that answers the whole question: Why did they put this in a museum? Because there was a curator who did it. And the curator has an art form or a skill or experience or message.

Sarah Lees:  If I can back up a minute. The reason, and I'm, I think the main reason that these are in museums is that Fates Ringgold fought like hell to get them there. She organized protests against the museum for not including black artists in their collection. She also, because there was often a conflict between the struggle for civil rights for African Americans and for women.

The conflict was she often felt divided as to where her allegiances lay. She also was co founder of a group called the Ad Hoc Women's Art Committee to protest the lack of women artists. from the 60s she had insisted that her work as a black woman be included in museums. So, The curators don't get so much credit, and it is really thanks to Faith Ringgold, in part, and others like her who organized, who protested, who insisted that their work was worth preserving and valuing.

Beth Bacon: I just can't even imagine how hard it was for her to feel like an outsider and still get the strength to advocate for herself.

Sarah Lees: Yeah, I think, how else do you keep going, right? If you know that what you're doing is worthwhile, you have to, you have to fight to get it seen. 

Beth Bacon: So one of the answers to why Faith Ringgold's work is in a museum is because she worked really hard to advocate for her own work. 

Sarah Lees: Absolutely. 

Beth Bacon: And open the eyes of curators in the art world.

Sarah Lees: That's it. Yeah, that something painted on a quilt is just as valuable as something on a canvas,  it really requires, you know, curators for one—but also the public —to want to insert a different history and a different tradition, into the space that apparently is most valued in terms of, you know, we build museums to house these things. But what is it that that makes it into them? I'm not saying that very clearly.  

Beth Bacon: Just knowing this little tiny sliver of her history, she started in this 1960s.And it wasn't until 2019 that her art ended up in a museum next to a Picasso. That sound like decades and decades of small steps. 

Sarah Lees:  Yeah, you're right. You're absolutely right. 

Beth Bacon: I wish the story was like, and then all of a sudden, everybody knew, but, working for something you believe in is a really, really long, hard haul. 

Sarah Lees: Yeah, no question. That is what it took. You're right. it's that kind of long term effort. She forced people to acknowledge, or convince people or cajole people, to see the value in her perspective. As a black woman, and as you say, maybe Tar Beach because the main protagonist is a child. Maybe that did make it more palatable, but once you dig deeper into all of Ringwald's accomplishments, the richness, the variety, just the incredible impact that her work has had, there's no way you couldn't acknowledge her work in a museum. That's what I would feel. 

Beth Bacon: Wonderful. And there is so much more to talk about. So maybe we can join again and talk about another, piece of Faith Ringgold or maybe another piece that is similar by an artist who may not have been established, who eventually got their work out there. 

Sarah Lees: Let's do it. 

Beth Bacon: Okay. Well, thanks so much. And that's our show.  We hope we've given you a fresh perspective. Sometimes if you learn a little more about an object and how it got there, its whole meaning can change.

Sarah Lees: And if you enjoyed this episode, please don't forget to subscribe, rate, and leave us a review. 

Beth Bacon: Tell your friends about why'd they put that in a museum. We love getting feedback and if you send us a question, you might inspire us to feature that on a future episode.

Sarah Lees: Yep, definitely, if you're ever in a museum and find yourself asking these questions, just, uh, drop us a note and maybe we can discuss that very object. 

Beth Bacon: Thanks for being here and please join us for our next episode of Why'd They Put That in a Museum. 

Sarah Lees: See you next time!