Romare Bearden

Romare Howard Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, on the second of September 1911. While he was still a young child his family joined the Great Migration northward, settling in New York City, where the Bearden home in Harlem became a gathering place for the artists and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance. His mother, Bessye Bearden, was a civic leader and journalist; that atmosphere of purpose and culture shaped the boy who would become one of America's defining visual artists.

He took his undergraduate degree at New York University in 1935 and afterward studied at the Art Students League under George Grosz. Following service in the United States Army during the Second World War, he traveled to Paris in 1950, studying art history and philosophy at the Sorbonne. These years of study and searching carried him from early scenes of the American South through periods of abstraction toward the language that would become his own.

In the politically charged 1960s Bearden found his true voice in collage, cutting and reassembling photographs and painted fragments into luminous compositions of African American life — church, jazz, ritual, the rural South, and the city. His acclaimed Projections and later mixed-media works earned him recognition as, in the words of his obituary, the nation's foremost collagist. A founding member of the Spiral group, he wrestled openly with the artist's role in the struggle for justice.

Honored with the National Medal of Arts in 1987, Bearden died in New York City on the twelfth of March 1988, having established a foundation to lift up young artists after him. May the honored ancestor Romare Bearden be remembered as the hand that gathered the scattered pieces of a people's story and made them whole and radiant.