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Tate, Don

Pigskins to Paintbrushes: The Story of Football-Playing Artist Ernie Barnes

48 pp. | Abrams | August, 2021 | Trade ISBN 978-1-4197-4943-8 $18.99 | Ebook ISBN 978-1-64700-497-2 $15.54
(2) K-3 Tate's latest picture-book biography (Swish!, rev. 11/20; William Still and His Freedom Stories, rev. 1/21) focuses on artist and professional football player Ernie Barnes (1938–2009). The opening pages describe Barnes's childhood struggle to find his place in "the Bottoms, a neighborhood of hardworking but poor African Americans" in Durham, North Carolina. A quiet, unathletic child, Ernie enjoys drawing and paging through art books at the house where his mother is employed as a cleaner. In an attempt to find social acceptance, he joins his school's football team; after a coach introduces him to bodybuilding, he begins to achieve athletic success. From there, the two parallel tracks of his life--visual art and football--continue until his late twenties, when he quits football for good and pours his energy into art, leading to international renown. Tate incorporates words from Barnes's memoir, From Pads to Palettes, into the story, grounding it in the artist's own memories and voice. At the same time, he makes the deliberate choice not to mimic Barnes's artistic style in the illustrations. (An afterword directs readers to Barnes's website and other sources, in order to "enjoy the true artwork of Ernie Barnes in its full glory.") It is impossible to tell the story of a Black American artist born in the 1930s without discussing segregation and racism, and Tate weaves those threads seamlessly into his narrative, drawing particular attention to the moment when Barnes exhibits his work at the North Carolina Museum of Art, a place where he had once been told by a docent that "your people don't express themselves this way." A comprehensive bibliography is appended.
Reviewer: K Rachael Stein | Horn Book Magazine Issue: November, 2021

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