Romare H. Bearden
Romare Bearden was born in North Carolina, but grew up in Harlem where his mother led the New York office of an African-American newspaper. As a result, Bearden became familiar with the artists of the Harlem Renaissance at an early age. To support himself, Bearden worked a full-time job in the New York Department of Social Services and, until the 1960s, had to limit his creative output to the evenings and weekends. Early in his career this included writing and songwriting, as well as the fine arts. He began as a painter and later developed an interest in interested in collage and printmaking. He strove to produce innovative work that concentrated on the African-American experience. In 1963, together with Norman Lewis, he founded the Spiral Group, an organization that produced works of art in response to the civil rights movement (ULAN). Romare Bearden is best known for his collages, which he began making in 1963, after several decades of painting in a linear and semi-abstract style. As cofounder of Spiral, a group convened "to examine the plight of the Black American artist", Bearden created his first collages for Spiral's inaugural show by juxtaposing enlarged photographic enlargements of magazine clippings with colored paper (often enhanced with graphite or paint) to convey human narratives of urban and rural African American life. As the writer Ralph Ellison put it, Bearden's collages convey the "sharp breaks, leaps in consciousness, distortions, paradoxes, reversals, telescoping of time and Surreal blending of styles, values, hopes and dreams which characterize much of Negro American history" (Laura Giles, Heather and Paul G. Haaga Jr., Class of 1970, Curator of Prints and Drawings)
