Romare Bearden. Evening 9:10, 461 Lenox Avenue. 1964. 8 ½ x 11 inches. Collage. Gallery Purchase Fund.
Romare Bearden was a modernist artist known for making collage his primary medium and for depicting the everyday experiences of African Americans across the country. Being born in1911 next door in Charlotte, North Carolina, Bearden’s name holds a unique weight on our college campus (particularly highlighted by the honorary degree granted to him in 1978).
We are lucky to have this particular piece in our collection, which is one of the only black and white collages Bearden produced over the course of his monumental career. When looking at any work produced by him, there is a marked tension between the modernist focus on process and technique (here, the collage) and the photographic realism of the subject matter, which for Bearden is always somewhat biographical and based on his own experience. Because of this unusual combination of abstract roughness and the detailed slices and cuts of the collage, Bearden manages to transcend any sort of genre and creates his own artistic language. Along with other art interns like Cole and Rebecca, I recently finished my art history course with Professor Shaw Smith that focused on Bearden specifically. Throughout the semester, we looked at the entirety of his career. Though we learned so much about this prolific artist, one fact stood out among the rest: Bearden used collage to transcend time, space, and art historical boundaries, which resulted in an intensely fascinating tradition of layering, cutting, ripping, and pasting, all mixed with traditional techniques such as painting and drawing. Bearden certainly set an amazing example of what it meant to combine art historical knowledge, studio practice, and ingenuity into one unique style.