Art Lessons: Learning to Interpret

Artist and author Faith Ringgold creates works of art that she refers to as storyquilts. Her most famous storyquilt, Tar Beach (1991), is also a children's book about Cassie. With her brother, parents, and neighbors, Cassie spends hot summer evenings on the roof of her building in New York City, imagining herself flying across the skyline, high above the buildings. Meaningful interpretations of this work reveal numerous references to other fields of knowledge. Wilson (1997) offers this summary of Tar Beach:

Two adult couples are shown eating their supper (a picnic on a tar beach) and a young girl, Cassie, lies on a blanket with her younger brother. . . . In her imagination, Cassie can "own" anything she flies over. As she says, "I am free to go wherever I want for the rest of my life." The George Washington Bridge is her most prized possession, but she also flies over a labor union building and an ice cream factory. By owning the labor building, she will be able to put an end to the discriminatory practices that have kept blacks and Native Americans out of the union. Cassie's flight also echoes a motif in African American folktale literature, in which slaves dreamed of flying to the North and to freedom. (P. 158)

Tar Beach has inspired elementary and secondary art, reading, and social studies teachers to engage students in producing quiltlike works that depict narratives about cooperation, community, and freedom. A meaningful unit of instruction based on Tar Beach requires much research and the expertise of many contributors: teachers, students, and other school-community members with relevant information. Wilson (1997) comments on a Tar Beach unit taught by classroom teacher Chris Tonsmeire.

Tonsmeire explained to her children that Tar Beach echoed the theme of slaves flying to freedom in African-American folk literature. As she explained, one of her students said, "That's just like Follow the Drinking Gourd"—a story of the Underground Railroad, by which slaves moved north to freedom before and during the Civil War. (P. 157)