Part IIIa: The Human Story

Liz de Souza (Washington), Memory, and the Living Presence of Art

By Mark Rengers

Liz de Souza is a writer, researcher, and cultural steward whose work centers on the preservation and interpretation of African American visual art history. The daughter of artist and author M. Bunch Washington, she grew up immersed in the lives and practices of artists, later emerging as a creative voice in her own right. Alongside her brother, Jesse Washington, she has played a central role in preserving her father’s archive and republishing his writing, while developing her own long-term project, Sleeping in the Fire, which explores the overlooked legacies of visionary African American artists.

Liz de Souza grew up in a home where art wasn’t decoration.

It wasn’t a finishing touch or a signal of taste. It was closer to a presence, something that shaped the atmosphere of the house the way some homes are shaped by music or conversation always happening somewhere nearby.

“I have always lived in homes where art is a defining part of that home,” she told me. “So I’ve never known what it is to live somewhere without the art surrounding me.”

Even when she left for college, she carried art with her. Not as an indulgence, but as something necessary. Visual art, art objects, artists, and the spaces artists create sustained her long before she would ever think of herself as someone with a creative life of her own.

That realization came later.

At fifty-five, Liz says plainly that she is “definitely a creative in my own right,” but she didn’t arrive there through ambition. She arrived there through observation. Through a lifetime of watching how artists live, work, struggle, and persist, and then recognizing those same patterns in herself.

“For half of my life,” she said, “my father was the artist that I knew and how I thought of artists was him.” Only later, as she began studying the lives of other artists, did she notice the same rhythms repeating. The same devotion. The same way of translating pressure into form.

“That’s when I realized, oh wait a minute,” she said. “I’m in this tribe.”

In Liz’s telling, art is not a category reserved for the fortunate. It is a way of seeing and surviving. A way of processing joy and difficulty. A way of making sense of what cannot otherwise be resolved.

Her understanding of this was shaped early by culture as much as by practice. Liz grew up between worlds. Her mother, from a European Jewish background, married an African American man, and the household held both shared values and meaningful differences. Liz speaks about this not as conflict, but as context.

“All of the arts overlap,” she said. Perspectives do too. Where you stand changes what you see. Her mother wrote, and through writing explored identity, history, and position. That layering of voice and image became part of what Liz understood as normal.

She described her childhood as the special part of everyday life, ordinary in structure but charged with meaning.

In her home, art was treated as something alive. Each piece had its own personality. Meaning wasn’t fixed. It shifted depending on who was looking and what they carried with them.

And then there was the book.

In Liz’s family, there was no need to clarify which book. It was simply the book. Her father, M. Bunch Washington, published a major monograph on Romare Bearden in 1972, when Liz was just two years old.

Liz holding “the book” c1991

She was born into its momentum.

She remembers watching her father and “Uncle Romy” on a small black-and-white television, the kind where a child can genuinely wonder if her father has somehow stepped inside the screen. Public history and private memory were never separate.

Romare Bearden is now a towering figure in American art, but Liz is careful to say that this was not always the case. He was respected, important in certain circles, but not widely known.

That, she believes, became her father’s mission.

“It was my father’s life mission to change that,” she said. “To make sure that Romare Bearden became a household word.”

The book itself mattered profoundly. It was the first major monograph ever published on an African American visual artist. These artists were not merely underrecognized. Liz is precise.

“They were actively blocked,” she said. “It was a hostile environment for African American artists.”

Even now, she notes, progress can appear more dramatic than it actually is. A few headlines or record-breaking sales can disguise deeper structural imbalance. Talent has never been the issue. Access and power have.

Liz also spoke about absence, not as an abstract idea, but as a lived condition. Absence from museum walls. Absence from galleries. Absence, most painfully, from the collective imagination. This was the reality her father and his peers confronted, a blank space where their work should have been. Over time, absence became not only an obstacle, but an engine, something that sharpened purpose and clarified urgency. It shaped how artists like her father and Romare Bearden worked, and it shaped how Liz understands her own role now, not simply as a witness to history, but as someone responsible for carrying forward stories that were never fully told.

That sense of responsibility extends beyond writing and research. At Mark Rengers Gallery, selections of work by M. Bunch Washington and Romare Bearden from Liz’s private collection are being shown as part of an ongoing effort to make these histories visible and accessible, not as distant artifacts, but as living presences.

When I asked why artists continued working despite these barriers, Liz answered without hesitation.

“Being an artist extends further than the work you create,” she said. “It’s a way of experiencing life.”

Art, in her view, is how people resolve what cannot otherwise be resolved. You may not be able to change a circumstance, but you can make something. You can put something into the world that wasn’t there before.

“And then you can sleep at night,” she said.

She spoke about her father’s work through this same lens. His paintings often play with perspective, asking the viewer to question foreground and background, what advances and what recedes. This was not simply visual experimentation. It was philosophy.

His transparent resin works change throughout the day as light passes through them. Colors shift. Shadows move. The work responds in real time.

In these pieces, Liz sees her father transforming sensitivity, something often dismissed as weakness, into strength.

Throughout our conversation, she returned to one central conviction: viewers must reclaim their right to look. Too many people believe interpretation belongs only to experts.

She rejects that entirely.

“Every interpretation is meaningful,” she said.

Through February 2026, works by M. Bunch Washington and Romare Bearden from Liz’s private collection will be on view at Mark Rengers Gallery. Seen in this context, the work does not function as a conclusion, but as a continuation. These are not objects sealed in history, but presences that still ask something of us.

Liz spoke often about responsibility, about what it means to carry a story forward rather than allow it to fade into abstraction. In sharing this work, she is doing exactly that, keeping the conversation open, visible, and alive.

In the end, her invitation is simple. Pause. Look. Stay with what you feel before you decide what it means.

Beardon - Homage to Mary Lou (Paino Lesson).

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Sources and Context

Primary sources

• Liz de Souza (Washington), interview with Mark Rengers, 2026

• Liz de Souza (Washington) and Jesse Washington, interviews, archival stewardship, and republication efforts related to M. Bunch Washington via bunchwashington.com

Secondary and contextual sources

• M. Bunch Washington, The Art of Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of Ritual (Harry N. Abrams, 1972)

• Mary Schmidt Campbell, An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden

• Lowery Stokes Sims, writings on museum representation and institutional exclusion

• Smithsonian American Art Museum research on segregation and access in 20th-century American art institutions

• Barnes Foundation archival materials documenting disparities in access and exhibition opportunities