Charlotte art fans are honoring one of the city’s native sons – Romare Bearden. The celebration marks the centennial of Bearden’s birth. While other cities around the country, including New York City, are also celebrating Bearden, Charlotte’s celebration is the sweetest because we can claim the right to be called Bearden’s home (he was born here in 1911).
Locally, more than 30 local, regional and national organizations have joined forces to host events honoring the legacy of one of the nation’s most preeminent artists.
The Mint Museum’s exhibition, Romare Bearden: Southern Recollections, debuted earlier this month and runs through January 2012. Southern Recollections is the exhibition is the first of its kind to examine in depth how the South served as a source of inspiration throughout Bearden’s career. The exhibition highlights themes unexplored in prior exhibitions or writings, and surveys fifty years of the artist’s work including his early abstract paintings and the influential collages that dominated his later body of work. Among the large thematic groupings will be selections from the Prevalence of Ritual series, which includes Bearden’s first revolutionary collages that demonstrate his ability to transform life into art, revealing abiding rituals and ceremonies of affirmation. Elements seen in this series are repeated throughout Bearden’s oeuvre, serving as icons for his statements about life in America. One such icon is the locomotive, which not only symbolizes a means of moving from one place/mode of life to another but also references the Underground Railroad, as well as the migration of Southern blacks to northern cities in the early twentieth century. The exhibit was made possible by generous contributions from Wells Fargo and Duke Energy.
