The One Hundred Children of Romare Bearden
According to Schriber, Bearden’s role as activist was triggered in large part by the Civil Rights march in Washington in 1963.
“A group of 15 African American artists came together, the Spiral Collective, directly in response. They wanted an outlet for discussions of politics and aesthetics and how the two overlapped. They had very different ideas about styles of painting,” she said.
In 1964 Bearden exhibited his “Projections” series, and through photo-montages of scraps drawn from ritual, myth and popular culture, a new revolution in the portrayal of blackness was born.
So where did this tsunami of artistic energy begin for Bearden?
He was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, but when he was barely a toddler, the Beardens moved to Harlem. It was a fortuitous move, as their house became a meeting place for many of the legendary figures of the Harlem Renaissance.
Music was a key component in that household (years later, he would co-write the hit song Sea Breeze, recorded by Billy Eckstine and Dizzy Gillespie). And music is present on the peripheries of this exhibit. Not all the artists chosen by the Studio took traditional collage as their direction. One in particular, Nicole Miller, has produced a crazy quilt of a video, featuring Princeton professor Cornel West in a disjointed, jive like monologue.
An eye-opening black and white mural depiction of a city block by Kira Lynn Harris occupies the walls of the Studio Museum’s basement. (Concurrently, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is honoring the artist till January 8 with a six-panel collage he did of a city block between West 132nd and 133rd Streets.) Early muralists like Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco filled Bearden’s bold imaginings, and this installation is a fitting tribute to his efforts in that direction.
The homage to Bearden doesn’t stop there. There are assemblages, some three-dimensional, like Matriarch, a skyscraper stack of painted crates created by a mother-daughter team of Maren and Ava Hassinger. Also notable is a salvaged window with transparencies, collage pieces, shoe polish, branches, and a stuffed bird entitled Home Grown – Windows to the Soul, by Dominique Moody.
Only two of Bearden’s own works have been added to the exhibit, including Conjur Woman, one of his best known collages. But there is no sense of a missing link. Neda Ulaby, a biographer of Bearden’s, has noted that Bearden in his last years claimed that collage helped him usher the past into the present. “After all,” he said, “the artist is a kind of enchanter in time.” And through the works of his hundred children, he has proven himself just that and more.
For more information and visiting hours visit http://www.studiomuseum.org.
