Romare Bearden

Marilyn M. Fosque
Mr. Briscoe
Seminar to Art 397.002
3/18/10
Romare Bearden
Most African American artist work during the18th and 19th century predominately reflected Eurocentric traditions. By the early 20th century however, a unique African American aesthetic came into being, merging African traditions of design with elements of black life.   The artistic development evolved further during the 1960’s and 1970’s when art was introduce to ironic imagery, filled afrocentric colors, designs and encouraged representations of black America’s struggle. While this tradition survives today, many African American artists are equally committed to searching out the sheer beauty and power of art for its own sake.
Romare Bearden is among the greatest artists of his generation. His complex and powerful works represent the places where he lived and worked which was in rural North Carolina, the urban area of the northern cities, primarily Pittsburgh and New York's Harlem, and the Caribbean island of St. Martin. Religious subjects and ritual practices, jazz clubs, and literature are dominant themes in his work. He usually gave sympathetic depictions of blacks in southern states. He believed that African American art should engage African American history, African aesthetics, black urban life and racism. Therefore, he created art inspired by African American traditions.  
Bearden’s artistic work with fragments of the past brought them into the present. Inn the South, during the early 20th century, there was a great migration with people leaving the South and moving North, especially towards New York City, so Harlem at that time was still very much Southern. Bearden took snippets of Harlem’s everyday life and through his artistic work; he connected them with vivid images of the American South. Bearden's collages bring to mind the pleasing graphic unity of patchwork quilts, into which slaves once sewed coded messages about the Underground Railroad. Meaning literally came out...