August Issue 2002
Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, NC, Features Exhibit of Works by Romare Bearden
The singular style of Charlotte-born artist Romare Bearden is easily the most widely recognized among African American artists of the 20th century. Charlotte's Own - Romare Bearden, on display Aug. 24 through Oct. 27 at the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, NC, marks the third time the museum is featuring his work. The exhibition is sponsored by Bank of America and IBM and serves as a companion to Narratives of African American Art and Identity: The David C. Driskell Collection.
While the greatest influence on Bearden's art was growing up in the exhilarating circle of intellectuals, community leaders, artists and musicians that his family was actively involved with in Harlem, Charlotte's claim of Romare Bearden as native son is evident in two of the artist's collage series, Mecklenburg County and Blues.
Romare Bearden was born on South Graham Street in Charlotte's Third Ward in 1912. His family moved to Pittsburgh when he was eight years-old and again to Harlem in his early teens. But his Charlotte ties continued with summer visits up to the death of his great-grandmother Rosa Kennedy in 1925. Bearden's childhood memories of the rituals of family life and the influence of blues and gospel spirituals indigenous to the segregated South proved fertile ground that the artist visually explored in his work.
"This exhibition, featuring works from area private and corporate collections, is a natural follow-up to our previous two Bearden shows," stated Charles L. Mo, Mint Vice President of Collections and Exhibitions. "The selection provides a rich visual opportunity to announce the museum's desire to build a repository of Romare Bearden art.
The museum's best known Bearden work, "Carolina Shout", originally was part of the exhibition "Romare Bearden 1970-1980", organized for a national tour by then Mint curator Jerald Melberg as a follow-up to the 1971 retrospective exhibition by the Museum of Modern Art. "Romare Bearden in Black and White: The Photomontage Project of 1964", exhibited at the museum in 1998, provided insight to the artist's earliest use of collage.
The majority of works displayed in Charlotte's Own - Romare Bearden will be his signature collages. During the 1940s Bearden painted linear abstract, figural works inspired by the Bible, Greek myth and literature. His work was selected for group exhibitions at the Whitney Annuals and State Department traveling exhibits in Europe and South America.
A love of music nearly put an end to his painting career. Returning from studies at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1950, Bearden elected to compose instead of paint. Music, conditioned by the blues idiom in general and jazz musicianship in particular, was his first love and a significant influence in his life. It was not until the mid 1950s that Bearden returned to painting, inspired by Matisse's bright Cubist compositions and the abstract expressionist style. It would still be another decade before Bearden began to work in collage, employing a mixed media style that made his indelible mark in American art history. While the modern art world embraced abstraction, Romare Bearden adopted collage as a medium in which fragments of the life he witnessed as a New York City social worker could be incorporated in a narrative form that so resoundingly hit a responsive chord among all people.
For more information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the museum at 704/337-2000 or on the web at (www.mintmuseum.org).
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