Romare Bearden

Romare Howard Bearden transformed the art of collage into a vehicle for telling the Black American story with unmatched visual poetry. His works — vibrant assemblages of cut paper, photographs, fabric, and paint — capture the rhythms of jazz, the rituals of the rural South, the energy of Harlem, and the spiritual depth of Black community life. He is widely regarded as one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century.

Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1911, Bearden grew up in Harlem, where his family's home became a gathering place for the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance — Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, and W.E.B. Du Bois were regular visitors. He studied mathematics at NYU, art at the Art Students League, and served in the Army during World War II before committing fully to art.

Bearden's breakthrough came in the 1960s when he began creating his signature collages, which married modernist technique with African American subject matter in ways no one had done before. His Prevalence of Ritual series and The Block are masterworks of American art. He co-founded the Spiral group of Black artists during the civil rights movement and spent his career insisting that Black art belonged in the center of American culture, not its margins.