October 08, 1930. Faith Ringgold (born October 8, 1930, in Harlem, New York City) is an artist, best known for her narrative quilts. Ringgold’s artistic practice was extremely broad and diverse, and included media from painting to quilts, from sculptures and performance art to children’s books. She was an educator who taught in the New York city Public school system and on the college level. In 1973, she quit teaching public school to devote herself to creating art full-time. n this image: Faith Ringgold, American People Series, The Flag is Bleeding, 1967, oil on canvas. Collection of the artist, c. Faith Ringgold. Courtesy ACA Galleries, NY.
Tar Beach (Part I from the Woman on a Bridge series) (1988)
Tar Beach, Ringgold's best known work, is the first quilt in her Woman on a Bridge series about a young African American girl, Cassie Louise Lightfoot, growing up in Harlem. In 1991 Ringgold published Tar Beach as a children's book for ages four to eight, and the book was named a Caldecott Honor Book, A New York Times Best Illustrated Book, and won the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration and the Parents' Choice Gold Award. Featured on Reading Rainbow, widely recommended by librarians and read by countless school children, Ringgold became a household name.
The story quilt depicts a family spending time outdoors on the rooftop or 'tar beach' of their apartment building. In the center image; clothes are drying on a clothesline; four people are gathered around a table playing cards, another table has food, and Cassie and her younger brother are resting on a blanket. The background depicts the New York City skyline, where Cassie is also is shown flying over the George Washington Bridge.
The scene is bordered by fabric squares, many of them with floral patterns, and at the top and bottom of the quilt another border of rectangles contains text, telling the girl's story. At top left the story begins," I will always remember when the stars fell around me and lifted me above the George Washington Bridge." Another section reads, "Sleeping on Tar Beach was magical ...only eight years old and in the third grade and I can fly. That means I am free to go wherever I want to for the rest of my life."
In 1963, tensions between black and white Americans grew feverish. Though the momentum of the Civil Rights movement peaked that summer with the March on Washington, racism remained at the core of American society. For many black residents of cities across the country, frustration over the stagnation, exclusion, and violence that racism wrought on their lives boiled over into rage—and in 1964, they began to riot.Faith Ringgold was in her early thirties at the time of the race riots and focusing on painting landscapes. The daughter of culturally engaged parents, she had been making art since her childhood. Despite making their home in a neighborhood that had become the seat of black art and literature during the Harlem Renaissance of the early 20th century, and despite its location in one of America’s most progressive cities, Ringgold and her family were also impacted by racism. In the 1960s, opportunities for black artists in the mainstream art world were close to zero and, in a double blow for Ringgold, women artists were also barely allowed in. Persisting in the face of these challenges, she brought her landscape paintings to the gallerist Ruth White, hoping for a show. White told her that, as a black artist, she should not paint landscapes during such a charged time.
“Some people might have been upset or hurt by it,” Ringgold said. “But I was happy that she had the courage to tell me that.” Channeling her own anger at the injustices she experienced and saw around her, she set aside her landscapes and began work on what would grow into a defining series of 20 paintings, titled “The American People,” with canvases populated with black and white protagonists that represented a society riven by racial division, and black people both caught within and striving against its constraints.“It was what was going on in America and I wanted [people] to look at these paintings and see themselves,” she explained
https://www.npr.org/2013/07/28/205773230/stories-of-race-in-america-captured-on-quilt-and-canvas 
