Romare Bearden (1911-1988), one of the most prolific, original, and acclaimed American artists of the twentieth century, richly depicted scenes and figures rooted in the American South and the Black experience. Bearden hailed from North Carolina but was forced to relocate to the North when a white mob harassed them in the 1910s. His family story is a compelling, complicated saga of Black middle-class achievement in the face of relentless waves of white supremacy. It is also a narrative of the generational trauma that slavery and racism inflicted over decades. But as Glenda Gilmore reveals in this trenchant reappraisal of Bearden's life and art, his work reveals his deep imagination, extensive training and rich knowledge of art history. Gilmore explores four generations of Bearden's family and highlights his experiences in North Carolina, Pittsburgh, and Harlem. She engages deeply with Bearden's art and considers it as an alternative archive that offers a unique perspective on the history, memory, and collective imagination of Black southerners who migrated to the North. In doing so, she revises and deepens our appreciation of Bearden's place in the artistic canon and our understanding of his relationship to southern, African American, and American cultural and social history.
Glenda Gilmore is the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History Emerita at Yale University.
"[In this] careful study [that feels] like a poignant dedication...Gilmore sets a timeline, critiques some striking artworks, and leaves the reader wondering why hardly anyone writes about art this succinctly...By contextualizing Bearden's art within larger critiques of a bourgeois industry, she does what all great art writing should do: re-politicize what has always been political."--Billie Anania, Jacobin "A powerful volume. . . . Bearden's work is evidence that one can go home, if only in memory."--INDY Week "A thoughtful, illuminating investigation of Bearden's place in--and shaping of--20th-century American art. . . . Incisive."--Kirkus Reviews "Inspiring. . . . An insightful biography of one of the twentieth century's most preeminent artists, whose powerful, intimate work illuminates the beauty and resilience of the human spirit."--Foreword Reviews "Like Bearden's art, Gilmore's biography pulses with energy and will resonate with readers of Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration."--Library Journal "To say that I was completely enchanted by Glenda Gilmore's new book on the late artist Romare Bearden is an understatement . . . [Gilmore] invites the reader to consider the ways in which we all construct our past by some strange alchemy of memory and creativity, filling in the gaps with stories we have heard or things we have dreamed or imagined. Does this make the past any less real? Does it make the people who inhabit it any less alive?"--Wiley Cash, The Assembly "Ultimately, this . . . volume packs a punch. It is simultaneously a meticulous biography of Bearden, an inspired interpretation of this work, and an expertly crafted primer on the practice of history."--Journal of Southern History "Well-illustrated with color images, written in a cogent and clear style, and relying on archival history, biography, and the visual arts, Gilmore's study weaves a compelling narrative of Bearden's complicated ties to his North Carolina origins and heritage through the rich visual symbolism of his works that illustrate the complexity of the African American diasporic experience."--North Carolina Historical Review
