Romare Bearden: The City He Left Behind

Romare Bearden was born in Charlotte in nineteen eleven. His family moved to Harlem when he was three years old, part of the Great Migration's early wave, Black families from the South following economic possibility northward. Charlotte, the city of his birth, does not appear prominently in most accounts of his life or his art. He grew up in New York. He studied in New York. He made his career in New York.

But the Charlotte childhood is in the work. Bearden's most celebrated pieces are collages, cut photographs and paper fragments assembled into dense, layered images of African American life: church interiors, musicians, storefronts, figures at tables, women in doorways. The Piedmont South is present as a kind of memory texture in the color and the composition, the way light falls on a particular porch, the arrangement of figures that echoes the social geography of a Southern community.

Bearden spent decades producing work that went largely unrecognized by mainstream American art institutions. He worked as a social services caseworker during the Depression and after, painting and making art alongside the work that paid his rent. Recognition came slowly, then all at once. By the nineteen eighties he was regarded as one of the major American visual artists of the twentieth century.

Charlotte opened a park named for him in two thousand thirteen, Romare Bearden Park in Uptown, a modest gesture toward a man who had left the city as a toddler and was claimed by New York for nearly his entire adult life. He died in nineteen eighty-eight.

The park sits near the site of what was once the Brooklyn neighborhood, the Black city-within-a-city that urban renewal demolished, the community whose texture lives on in Bearden's collages long after the buildings are gone.