“Art is always made from other art, and you just have to find your place.”
Romare Bearden was 53 years old in 1964, the year he made his first series of collages. By that point in his life, he had already had several careers. As a visual artist, he made cartoons and illustrations for various magazines and newspapers in the 1930s, works inspired by religion in the 1940s, and abstract paintings in the 1950s. He was also the songwriter of the 1954 hit “Seabreeze,” performed by Billy Eckstine, and a caseworker for the New York City Department of Social Services, a job he held until 1969.
In 1963, Bearden hosted a number of other Black artists at his Canal Street studio to discuss how to support the forthcoming March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, organized by Martin Luther King Jr. and others. This group eventually adopted the name Spiral, and Bearden suggested that they engage in collage as a collaborative art-making activity. While that project never materialized, his own facility with the medium flourished.
Using a broad range of images, colors, and textures clipped from a variety of sources, Bearden produced his first group of small collages shortly after this meeting; they focused on elements of Black life past and present. The works transcended figuration, with their overlapping planes and torn edges of different paper fragments, but had recognizable subjects, like a busy New York City street. He also depicted the “Conjur Women” he remembered from his time as a child in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. “The Conjur Woman was essential, people went to her for medication and advise on health and personal affairs,” Bearden explained, “but she was also feared, in that through her knowledge of certain herbs, roots, and mysterious practices, she could put a spell, or a ‘conjur,’ on a person.” As he would do throughout his career, Bearden experimented with his own artworks, turning these intimate collages into large-scale photostats.
In 1971 Bearden became only the second Black artist to receive a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art. The major survey show included the Museum’s newly acquired Patchwork Quilt. Larger in scale, rich in color and in the diversity of material used, including printed colored papers and fabric scraps, this collage shows significant development in Bearden’s collage techniques, which he would continue to refine until the last decade of his life.
Bearden once described his visual art practice as one of constant discovery: ”I am trying to find out what there is in me that is common to, or touches, other men.” This search led beyond his own art to that of his friends and colleagues. Devoted to supporting other artists (especially Black artists), beginning in 1964 Bearden served as the first art director of the Harlem Cultural Council. Together with artists Norman Lewis and Ernie Crichlow, he also founded the Cinque Gallery to provide exhibition opportunities for young Black artists, and co-authored the major publication A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present.
Esther Adler, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, 2023
Note: Opening quote is from Romare Bearden in “Inscription at the City of Brass,” interview by Charles H. Rowell, Callaloo 36 (Summer 1988), 439.
