Artist Spotlight: Romare Bearden and the Politics of Assembly
Romare Bearden, The Block, 1971. Six-panel collage.
In an era where debates about identity, representation, and belonging dominate both galleries and social media, Romare Bearden’s work feels more urgent than ever. A pioneer of collage, Bearden didn’t just depict Black life—he reassembled it. His art didn’t seek to escape complexity; it leaned into it, piece by piece, insisting that the fragments of a lived Black experience could still form something defiantly whole.
Romare Bearden.
Born in 1911 in Charlotte, North Carolina, Bearden came from a richly mixed heritage—African American, Cherokee, and Italian. Raised in the vibrant cultural scenes of Pittsburgh and Harlem, he came of age during the Harlem Renaissance, studying at NYU (where he became art editor for The Medley) and later at the Sorbonne in Paris. Bearden was fair-skinned, and this allowed him access to predominantly white academic spaces and elite art institutions often closed to other Black artists. But he never used that access to distance himself from his identity. Instead, he made Black life the centerpiece of his practice—its joys, contradictions, and textures. Whether designing sets for Alvin Ailey or co-writing A History of African American Artists, Bearden refused to silo his creativity. Art, for him, was a way to document, question, and rebuild.
Collage as Radical Method
Romare Bearden, Mother and Child, 1971. Collage.
At a time when many modern artists sought abstraction or escape, Bearden chose specificity. While Abstract Expressionists like Pollock chased chaos and universality, Bearden constructed faces from African masks, old magazines, bits of cloth, and torn newsprint. His materials weren’t just mixed media—they were cultural artifacts. They drew on influences as diverse as Byzantine mosaics, Japanese prints, and Chinese landscapes, telling a story not just of personal vision, but of global Black imagination.
His 1971 work The Block offers a panoramic view of Harlem as a pulsing organism: storefront churches, apartment windows, musicians in doorways. Each detail feels at once deeply local and globally resonant. A barbershop is not just a place of grooming, but of transformation. A street corner becomes a stage. A face—layered with unexpected textures—becomes a mirror. Two of these textured faces would later grace the covers of Time and Fortune in 1968, a rare feat for any artist, let alone a Black modernist working in a ‘minor’ medium.
A Life Between Worlds
Bearden’s fair skin placed him in a complicated position. He could pass through doors many of his peers could not, but inside those rooms, he was still regarded with caution, contradiction, or exoticism. Critics sometimes questioned whether he was “Black enough” to speak for the community his work celebrated. Others tried to universalize his images, flattening the particularities he worked so carefully to layer.
This ambiguity shaped his practice. His collages feel like coded messages—truths stitched from competing influences. In the 1970s, those influences stretched to the Caribbean, where he and his wife Nanette Rohan established a second home on her ancestral island of St. Martin. The lush greens and cobalt waters of the tropics seeped into his later work, adding yet another geography to his visual language. In an America obsessed with clarity and categorization, Bearden chose multiplicity. As he once said:
"I try to show that when some things are taken away, what's left is not necessarily loss."
Why Bearden Matters to Us
At the Northeast Louisiana Delta African-American Heritage Museum, we spotlight Bearden not simply because of his fame, but because of his method. He was an artist of the South as much as the North, a bridge-builder who co-founded The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Cinque Gallery to uplift younger Black artists. His work on migration, memory, and Black domestic life resonates deeply here in the Delta, where so many families carry generational stories of movement, resilience, and rebuilding.
The Studio Museum. Harlem, NYC.
Bearden reminds us that identity is never singular. That history is not linear. That you can be both insider and outsider—and still make something that belongs entirely to you.
An Invitation to Look Closely
Bearden didn’t just make pictures—he made meaning. He designed dance sets, wrote history books, and turned magazine covers into art manifestos. He showed us how to assemble the pieces of ourselves, even when the world tries to tear them apart. The next time his work comes to a museum near you, don’t just view it. Study it. Listen to what the layers are saying.
Because in Bearden’s world, nothing is random. And nothing is ever truly lost.
