Romare Bearden (1911–1988), one of the most prolific, original, and acclaimed American artists of the twentieth century, richly depicted scenes and figures rooted in the American South and the Black experience. Bearden hailed from North Carolina but was forced to relocate to the North when a white mob harassed his family in the 1910s. His family story is a compelling, complicated saga of Black middle-class achievement in the face of relentless waves of white supremacy. It is also a narrative of the generational trauma that slavery and racism inflicted over decades. But as Glenda Gilmore reveals in this trenchant reappraisal of Bearden's life and art, his work reveals his deep imagination, extensive training, and rich knowledge of art history. Gilmore explores four generations of Bearden's family and highlights his experiences in North Carolina, Pittsburgh, and Harlem. She engages deeply with Bearden's art and considers it as an alternative archive that offers a unique perspective on the history, memory, and collective imagination of Black southerners who migrated to the North. In doing so, she revises and deepens our appreciation of Bearden's place in the artistic canon and our understanding of his relationship to southern, African American, and American cultural and social history.

Between 1952 and about 1963 Romare Bearden created a large body of abstract watercolors, oil painting, and collages. Some titled, some not, they range in height from over seven feet to just under three inches. Exhibited with success at the time of their execution, these artworks are little know today, yet they directly inform the collages for which he is now best known and that he begain creating in the mid-1960's, such as Melon Season. This essay is not intended to be biographically comprehensive but rather to establish a chronology for the period during which Bearden produced the abstractions, to fill in missing factual information, and to bookend this decade of his production, front and back. Romare Bearden : Abstraction tells the story of a historically neglected but extraordinary and critically important period of time and body of work. -- from author.

Foreword by Bridget Moore. Text by Robert G. O'Meally.

A train journey in Romare Beardens childhood, inspired by one of his collage paintings

By the time of his death in 1988, Romare Bearden was most widely celebrated for his large-scale public murals and collages, which were reproduced in such places as Time and Esquire to symbolize and evoke the black experience in America. As Mary Schmidt Campbell shows us in this definitive, defining, and immersive biography, the relationship between art and race was central to his life and work -- a constant, driving creative tension. Bearden started as a cartoonist during his college years, but in the later 1930s turned to painting and became part of a community of artists supported by the WPA. As his reputation grew he perfected his skills, studying the European masters and analyzing and breaking down their techniques, finding new ways of applying them to the America he knew, one in which the struggle for civil rights became all-absorbing. By the time of the March on Washington in 1963, he had begun to experiment with the Projections, as he called his major collages, in which he tried to capture the full spectrum of the black experience, from the grind of daily life to broader visions and aspirations. Campbell's book offers a full and vibrant account of Bearden's life -- his years in Harlem (his studio was above the Apollo theater), to his travels and commissions, along with illuminating analysis of his work and artistic career. Campbell, who met Bearden in the 1970s, was among the first to compile a catalogue of his works. An American Odyssey goes far beyond that, offering a living portrait of an artist and the impact he made upon the world he sought both to recreate and celebrate.

From Process to Print: Graphic Works by Romare Bearden celebrates the etchings, aquatints, collagraphs, photo projections, lithographs, and screenprints of one of America's most important twentieth-century artists. From Process to Print accompanies the traveling exhibition of the same title organized by the Romare Bearden Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit organization established in 1990 to preserve, perpetuate, and make publicly accessible Bearden's rich artistic and intellectual legacy through its programs. More than seventy-five full-color reproductions demonstrate Bearden's printmaking process as he worked and reworked particular images, themes, and techniques; illuminate how his thinking and approaches were shaped through collaborations with master printmakers, especially Robert Blackburn; and evidence Bearden's extraordinary facility for weaving into every art form a rich tapestry of literary, biblical, mythological, popular-culture, and Western and non-Western themes that were informed by his African American cultural experiences. Included are prints based on collages, such as the Odysseus series and The Piano Lesson. Also featured are his highly acclaimed works The Family and The Train, which Bearden reworked in several media through photographic processes and changes in technique, scale, and color. The essay by Mary Lee Corlett thoroughly examines Bearden's graphic oeuvre, discussing the artist's methods and revealing him as a fearless experimenter and innovator in various print techniques. Interviews with renowned printmakers Mohammad Omer Khalil and Kathleen Caraccio, both of whom worked with Bearden, offer valuable insights into the artist's methods.

This book relocates Bearden's Caribbean experience to the center of the work he did during the most productive period of his life. Produced in full color, it includes 130 Bearden paintings, almost all Caribbean watercolors and collages, few of which have ever been published.