Researching Bearden
The Ask
Over the course of my African American Art history course, students were introduced to two centuries of major themes and ideas presented within Black art. As a final assessment we were tasked with researching our own artists and formulating a paper analyzing and contextualizing their work. I chose the painting and collage works of artist and writer Romare Bearden.
What Did I Do
Through my research I was able to place Bearden’s works within the context of what it means to be a Black artist. Being an artist who documents the human condition, regardless of race, is a struggle for many Black artist who desire for recognized beyond their racial identity. I analyzed his earlier painted work and compared them to his later collage work to see how the themes of the work are different, as well as their stylistic and creative differences.
Selected Excerpt
As an African American artist living and working in America, it is difficult to create works without the contextualization of Black life. Black artists are often confronted with the ordeal of portraying work that uplifts their people and culture while also producing work that is satisfactory to them as a person. This struggle between contextualizing Blackness in and through their art as well as conveying human nature, regardless of race, is something that Black artists must face. An example of this can be seen in the works of Romare Bearden. His earlier works often portraying narratives with universal appeal and his later works portray the everyday rural experience of southern Black people, drawing influence from his childhood in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. He is a perfect case study of the predicament that African American artist find themselves in.
I will be comparing his early work Golgotha from his Passion of Christ series and his later work Tomorrow I May Be Far Away. In Golgotha the subject matter is the story of Christ’s crucifixion, an almost universal story that has disseminated across cultures and regions over thousands of years. In stark contrast is Tomorrow I May Be Far Away, a collage based on the nuanced aspects of southern Black culture and cultural aspects that may not be immediately obvious to the viewer. In these two works you can see a shift in Bearden’s emphasis in his works, with his earlier pieces being about universal human traits and themes, while his later work was more heavily rooted in the Black experience in America, in particular the South. This change came about as Bearden became more heavily invested in the promotion and mentoring of Black artists and witnessed the onset of the Civil Rights movement.