“Prejudice,” she writes in her autobiography, We Flew Over the Bridge (1995), “was all-pervasive, a permanent limitation on the lives of black people in the thirties. However, as the saga of her life unfolds across this highly telescoped sampling from a 50-year career - organized by Dorian Bergen of ACA Galleries in New York and expanded by the Crocker - what becomes abundantly clear from the 43 works on view is that it was artist, not the stars, doing the lifting. Born in 1930, at the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance, she strove to join the ranks of the outsized talents surrounding her: Sonny (“Saxophone Colossus”) Rollins, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Romare Beardon, Duke Ellington and Jacob Lawrence to name just a few.
The title of the piece, now on display in Faith Ringgold: An American Artist at the Crocker Art Museum, comes from fantasies the artist entertained as a child on the roof of her family home in the affluent Sugar Hill neighborhood of Harlem. “I will always remember when the stars fell down around me and lifted me up above George Washington Bridge,” writes painter/activist Faith Ringgold in the opening stanza of her signature “story quilt,” Tar Beach # 2 (1990). Tar Beach #2, 1990, silkscreen on silk, 60 x 59 inches
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