Arguably the nation’s foremost collagist, Romare Beadern epitomizes the Harlem Renaissance and illustrates art’s intersection with the civil rights movement. Born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1911, Bearden moved to Harlem in 1914 during the Great Migration. A renaissance-man, he held a plethora of positions from Social Services case worker, to semi-professional baseball player, to soldier on World War II’s European front. In the midst of the 1960s civil rights movement, Bearden assisted in the founding of Spiral, a collection of Harlem-based artists formed “for the purpose of discussing the commitment of the Negro artist in the present struggle for civil liberties, and as a discussion group to consider common aesthetic problems.” This group of artists directly impacted Bearden’s experimentation with artistic expression as it pertained to a greater social movement.
Stylistically Bearden wavered between representational images focusing on the Black experience and abstraction. Bearden’s experimentation with collage, printmaking and abstraction came to fruition in Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop. Carolina Memories was produced in Blackburn’s workshop with the rainbow roll technique from the key etching plate of his well-known edition, The Train, which depicts African-American figures waiting for a train.
For Bearden, trains were pivotal to the African-American experience. Stating that “in the little towns it’s the black people who live near trains,” Bearden reflected that trains “could take you away and could also bring you to where you were.” In this way, The Train acts as a commentary on both the inherent socioeconomic inequality of African-Americans and the power of physical and emotional travel. Carolina Memories simultaneously encapsulates the essence of The Train in a visually stunning fashion and acts as an homage to Bearden’s roots in North Carolina.
Henry Bieze (‘24)
In 1963, Romare Bearden was a founding member of Spiral, a group of Black American artists who met regularly to think about ways of responding to the Civil Rights Movement through art. When discussing possible communal projects, Bearden suggested that the thirteen Spiral artists make a communal collage from his large archive of media and art historical images. When this did not happen, Bearden himself pursued this idea and produced a series of collages from cutting and combining these materials. From these “original” photomontages, Bearden would then often find ways to reproduce these collages through photography and printmaking. Carolina Memories began its life as one of his early photomontage called Mysteries from 1964. In Wake Forest’s iteration of the image, the artist makes the details more difficult to decipher due to the horizontal washes of pink, gray and blue.
What details do you see in Carolina Memories? Bearden used his works, partially, to analyze existing representations of Black America in the print media. For instance, in a July 29, 1963 issue of Newsweek, the writer relied on harmful stereotypes to describe living conditions for Black Americans. He wrote that Black families “still live in old, unpainted shacks with collards in the garden, petunias in a coffee can” and that they hang “a dimestore picture of Christ or an almanac ad for Sweet Railroad Mills Snuff” on the wall.” In Carolina Memories, Bearden seems to depict something like this shack with a family gathered at a table. In the left foreground, Bearden adds another detail used in degrading portrayals of Black Americans in the 1960s: a slice of watermelon. Carolina Memories is an image partially rooted in the disparaging views of Black Americans prevalent in the American media.
But, at the same time, Bearden renders this image strange through his photomontage technique – with its distortions in scale and the cut-and-paste disjunctions between individual components. Carolina Memories thus appears as something constructed, something manipulated – and decidedly not the truth.
Returning to Spiral, this work thus aligns with the goals of the Civil Rights movement, as it challenges viewers to see media bias in the portrayal of Black American lives. By titling this work Carolina Memories, is Bearden reminding viewers how media representations have clouded or even shaped existing memories? While he is from Charlotte, these are not necessarily Bearden’s own recollections; rather, they are the distortions of the American mass media.
Dr. Jay Curley, Associate Professor of Art History, Department of Art
Romare Bearden and la préscence humaine
“A style is achieved by an artist through his introduction of personal forms into the grand style of his period.” Romare Bearden
Relentless beauty of everyday life.
“Bearden’s human material embraces a very considerable variousness, and everywhere it is handled at once with reverence and elegance, as though the human figure were for him in the most exact sense a sacramental reality, ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.’” ~ Nathan A. Scott, Jr.
Master modernist who did not submit to the dominant ideology of modernity.
Cosmopolitan visions – “plastic possibilities” in the words of Ralph Ellison – of carolina and collage.
The s/South is and is not. It is home. Its beauty, elegance, and piercing pain may only be known through layers of fragments.
Who explores the depths of possibility? How? With what form?
The rough texture and stark angles of existence. An odyssey of myth and memory and material. An intensity of perspective leaves its imprint on the (un)conscious. An infinite beginning without origin.
How do you narrate Black life?
An excessive and unbounded blackness.
Math. Medicine. Matisse. Memory, form, and technique.
Collage is craft is collaboration is community is cosmos is conjure.
A confrontation and challenge to our trained incapacity to see – the arrested development of our field of vision. Our single angle of sight. Our diminished culture of taste.
An open invitation. Bearden welcomes. Beside me and Friendship are apples and music and pews and fences. Images flow. We travel home.
Dr. Corey D. B. Walker, Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities, Department of English and Interdisciplinary Humanities Program