Romare Bearden

Romare Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1911. When Bearden was three years old, the family moved to New York at the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance. His mother, a newspaper editor, entertained widely and the young Romare met such figures as Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes. For economic reasons, the family moved frequently and Bearden spent a year in Pittsburgh with his maternal grandmother. He visited Charlotte often in the summers, and early memories from this time surfaced later in his art - the railroad, gardens and of course, music.

Bearden went to Boston University for two years, and was a gifted athlete and the star pitcher for the baseball team. He graduated from New York University in 1935 with a degree in mathematics. A year later, he met and worked with an informal group of Harlem artists, then enrolled at the Art Students' League. Although he worked as a caseworker for the Department of Welfare in New York City, Bearden always had time to work as an artist. He and his friends were very much a part of the Harlem music scene, and jazz and swing had an enormous influence on his life, images of which appear frequently in his art.

His work was becoming more abstract, and in the early 1960s he turned to collage as a means of expression. His first show at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. took place in 1965. His work was a reflection of how Bearden felt about the life of African Americans during a time of great civil rights conflict. It also showed pride in his African heritage and he sometimes used African masks and sculptures in his collages, juxtaposing and overlaying them with oversized body parts. Many of his collages reflected his personal attitude to the passage of blacks in America, and many were personal statements, memories about music, performers and life in Harlem.

He received enormous acclaim for his work, receiving five honorary doctoral degrees. He was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1966. In 1987, he was awarded the President's National Medal of the Arts.
He continued working until his death from cancer in 1988.