![]() “My women,” proclaimed Ringgold about the Women on a Bridge series, “are actually flying they are just free, totally. That means I am free to go wherever I want to for the rest of my life.” For Ringgold, this phantasmic flight through the urban night sky symbolizes the potential for freedom and self-possession. ” explains Cassie in the text on the quilt, “only eight years old and in the third grade and I can fly. Tar Beach, the first quilt in Ringgold’s colorful and lighthearted series entitled Women on a Bridge, depicts the fantasies of its spirited heroine and narrator Cassie Louise Lightfoot, who, on a summer night in Harlem, flies over the George Washington Bridge. The naive, folk-art quality of the quilts is part of Ringgold’s scheme to emphasize narrative over style, to convey information rather than to dazzle with elaborate technique. That Ringgold’s great-great-grandmother was a Southern slave who made quilts for plantation owners suggests a further, perhaps deeper, connection between her art and her family history. ![]() She originally collaborated on the quilt motif with her mother, a dressmaker and fashion designer in Harlem. Description: 'Ringgold’s vehicle is the story quilt-a traditional American craft associated with women’s communal work that also has roots in African culture. ![]()
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