'“I will always remember when the stars fell down around me and lifted me up above the George Washington Bridge,” reads the beginning of the text on this artwork, one of five in the series “New York Quilts.” The narrator is Cassie Louise Lightfoot, who takes flight during a heat wave. She can be seen floating above the Harlem rooftops, her arms extended as she soars over her family. The piece may channel a childlike innocence—it was developed into a picture book, also by Ringgold, published in 1991—but it does not paper over the lived realities of Black women like the artist.
If the experiences of Ringgold and many other Black women are frequently denied by the mainstream, Ringgold upholds them here, echoing what it’s truly like to live in Harlem, a neighborhood whose predominantly Black citizenry long went unrepresented within the walls of art spaces. (The quilt format itself is a reference to a long Black tradition of art-making, which her grandmother practiced.) Crucially, other, related quilts by Ringgold feature New York cityscapes populated only by Black men, women, and children; they are at the center of Ringgold’s world, rather than existing at its margins.'
