March, 2007 --The Modernist artist, Romare Bearden, was recognized as one of the most original voices of the twentieth century. He experimented with many different media and artistic styles, but is best known for his richly textured collages depicting universal images using African American subjects. In 1970, Bearden co-founded the Black Academy of Arts and Letters and was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1972. He closely associated with the artists, intellectuals and musicians of his era: Stuart Davis, Joan Miro, George Grosz, Alvin Ailey, Duke Ellington, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. Bearden's work is included in many important public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among others.
Initiated in 1998, the Bearden National Symposium series encourages and supports new scholarship on Bearden at colleges and universities across the country. Romare Bearden in the Modernist Tradition, Friday, April 20, 2007 from 5:30 pm to 9:00pm and Saturday, April 21, 2007 from 9:00 am to 5:30 pm, will be presented at Columbia College Chicago at the Film Row Cinema Theater and Conaway Center, 1104 S. Wabash Avenue, 8th and 1st Floors, Chicago, Illinois. Registration for this free symposium can be completed at www.colum.edu/romarebearden or for more information contact Andrew Whatley at 312.344.7886.
"Bearden blazed a path for all artists," says Dawoud Bey, professor of photography at Columbia and project coordinator for the Bearden symposium. "His work talked about universal issues, but he was insistent upon using black subjects. The image of a mother and child is universal. The image of a black mother and child is not any more or less universal."
Kobena Mercer, PhD., Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Visual Culture and Media at Middlesex University in London, will be the keynote speaker. Dr. Mercer is the author of Romare Bearden: African American Modernism at Mid-Century in Art History and Romare Bearden, 1964 Collage as Kunstwollen. His topics include research on Bearden's lifelong dialogue with Picasso as a key aspect of his relation to modernist tradition. He will emphasize how Bearden's dialogue actively translates post-Cubist pictorial space into Afro-Diasporic contexts, where function of dialogue underpins call and response in music and serial improvisation in jazz. Through this approach he will critique conventional notions of classifying Bearden and fellow African American modernists into strict chronologically and stylistically based categories. He will also show that such dialogues fruitfully cross the borders of the literary and the visual such that Bearden's dialogue with Ralph Ellison is on par with Picasso and Gertrude Stein or Breton or Miro. Another example of Bearden in dialogue with literature was his relation to Nobel Laureate, Derek Wolcott's poems during the 1980s, which Dr. Mercer will present as more than mere illustration but as inter-media dialogue. Addressing how images travel in the Afro-Diasporic imagination, he will discuss South African artists of the 1970s and 80s - Sam Nhlengethwa and Kay Hassan who use collage as critical re-cycling, 'signifying' on aspects of apartheid and highlighting a public sphere crossed by structural boundaries. This keynote address was used to outline the structure of the symposium. The topics for presentation are grouped thematically and are roughly chronological.
The first topic in Romare Bearden In the Modernist Tradition examines Bearden's practice in relation to early modernism and the artists and artistic movements that influenced him, for example, his formal art training with Georg Grosz and his interest in Dada and life-long exploration of Cubism. And his abiding interest in world art from Africa, Asia and Europe. African art is of special interest as a topic, as a fundamental influence on the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, and as art forms from which Bearden "quoted" and which he greatly admired.
Bearden combined the above influences with elements of African American vernacular in his work, creating a visual form whose elements Ralph Ellison said "characterized much of African American history." The friendship between artist and author is but one of several significant ongoing dialogues between Bearden and fellow artists, writers and musicians. Through this second group of topics the presenters will examine the interchange between Bearden and his peers. A proposed interview with artist and Spiral Group members Emma Amos will provide the history of the group that was formed, in part, as a response by African American artists to the growing Civil Rights Movement. Spiral Group, established in 1963, also included Hale Woodruff and Norman Lewis, and was the setting of Bearden's "break through," his adoption of collage as his primary mode of artistic expression.
The next category of presentations will examine Bearden's influence on subsequent generations of artists as a towering figure in African American art who sought, through his aesthetic and intellectual pursuits, to mediate between representing African American culture and following the tenets of modernism. They will also examine the far-reaching influence of Bearden in the African Diaspora.
The last category of topics examines Bearden's use of photography, Photostat and other technology through the lens of post-modernist discourse and practice. In performances and exhibitions, artists and musicians appropriate images and sample and loop sounds from multiple sources, blurring the lines between different media and defying categorization. Scholars and artists will discuss Bearden as bricoleur, and his influence on contemporary practice.
Symposium Presenters: Kobena Mercer, Ph.D., Senior Research Fellow, Department of Visual Culture and Media, Middlesex University; Emma Amos, Artist, Professor of Art, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University; Radcliffe Bailey, Artist, Assistant Professor of Art, Lamar Dodd School, University of Georgia; Dawoud Bey, Artist, Professor of Photography, Columbia College Chicago; Melvin Edwards, Artist, Professor of Art (ret.), Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University; Geoffrey Jacques, Ph.D., Poet and Critic, Faculty of English Department, Lehman College, City University of New York; Greg Foster Rice, Ph.D., Art History, Assistant Professor, Art History, Columbia College Chicago; Courtney Martin, Ph.D. candidate, Art History, Yale University; Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky, Conceptual artist, writer, and musician; Amy Mooney, Ph.D., Professor, Art History, Columbia College Chicago; Robert O'Meally, Zora Neale Hurston Professor of American Literature and Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University; Kym Pinder, Associate Professor of Art History and Director of the Master of Arts in Art History program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Raél Jero Salley, Ph.D. candidate, The University of Chicago, The Committee on the History of Culture. Adjunct Faculty, Columbia College Chicago and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Helen Shannon, Ph.D., Art History, Director of Museum Education, University of the Arts, Philadelphia; William T. Williams, Artist, Professor of Art, Brooklyn College, City University of New York.
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