Romare Bearden was an American artist, born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1911, who grew up between the South, Pittsburgh and Harlem and died in New York in 1988. He built collages of Black American life from cut paper, fabric and photographs, and he found the medium late: his first collage show opened in 1964, when he was 53.
Before that he had been a newspaper cartoonist, a soldier, a city social worker and a painter of abstractions. The pictures that museums now fight over came after all of it.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
In 1963, with the civil rights movement at its height, a group of Black artists met in Bearden's studio to ask what they could do about it. They called themselves Spiral. Bearden's own answer did not look like a protest. It looked like a street.
He made small collages of Harlem and the South, had them photographed, and blew them up to the size of billboards. On 6 October 1964, about two dozen of these black-and-white enlargements opened in New York under the title Projections. Ernest Crichlow, a fellow member of Spiral, called them a "homecoming."
The artist everyone was talking about that autumn was still a caseworker for the city's Department of Social Services, and he kept that job after the show opened. Collage was not a lifelong plan. He came to it after cartoons, figure painting and abstraction.
What You'll Discover
The three places he never stopped painting.
The long road before his first collage.
What happened in his studio in 1963.
How a few scraps filled a wall.
What he saw from a friend's balcony.
How Homer ended up in cut paper.