Romare Bearden

Romare Bearden (1911 - 1988), was an African American artist, writer, and cultural historian renowned for his collages and photomontages, a technique he began to experiment with in the late 1950s, establishing his reputation as a leading contemporary artist. To many African Americans, Bearden is one of the pre-eminent visual storytellers of their collective history, and his art a repository of cultural signifiers and safekeeping. Bearden is the visual equivalent of a griot, both traditional memory keeper and radical innovator in his use of the images around him to capture the profound moments of life. Through his art he created a visual mythology for African American culture based, in many cases, on actual experiences or stories from his own life or those around him. Bearden found a way to make even the most ordinary moments ring with the supernatural clarity of mythic dreamtime. His blending, sampling, and subverting of African American environmental portraiture, African tribal masks and design motifs and pop culture commercial images pushed Bearden to the forefront of African Diaspora modernism. Bearden considered his process akin to that of jazz and blues composers. Bearden’s impact and influence only grows deeper with each passing generation. (KS)