Artist: Barbara Valenta

Workshop: Printmaking

Grade Level:  K  -   6

Book: Tar Beach               
           Author and illustrator Faith Ringgold
           New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1996

For me, Faith Ringgold's book Tar Beach is all about the transformation power of art, and how artistic perception and expression give us true "ownership" of the world. Tar Beach conjures up Ringgold's childhood and the roof of her family's apartment building near the George Washington Bridge. Seeing the tar roof through the lens of artistic expression, Ringgold has transformed it into a "beach" from which "stars fell down around me and lifted me up above the George Washington Bridge". As a young girl, she flies above her world and feels "rich, like I owned all that I could see. The bridge was my most prized possession". Later in the book, she addresses the union's discrimination against her father, but makes it clear that by "flying above" everything and seeing it through an artist's eyes, she overcomes these obstacles. At the books' end she says, "It's easy to fly. All you need is somewhere to go that you can't get to any other way." This very happy postive book shows Faith as a young girl in various city contexts. We look down on her framed by the rug on her roof or look up at her floating in the blue night sky.