Part IIIc: The Circle Widens
Romare Bearden and the Language of Interconnection
By Mark Rengers
Before turning to the deeper ideas that shape Romare Bearden’s work, it helps to situate the artist himself. Romare Howard Bearden (1911–1988) was an American artist, writer, and cultural thinker whose career spanned much of the twentieth century. Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, he came of age during the Great Migration and spent formative years between New York City and Pittsburgh, attending Peabody High School before returning to New York for his studies. Over the course of his life, Bearden worked in painting, drawing, printmaking, and, most notably, collage, developing a visual language that fused African American history, global cultural traditions, and modernist experimentation. Today, his work is held by major museums around the world. In Pittsburgh, a city not far from this gallery, Bearden’s presence remains tangible through Pittsburgh Recollections (1984), a monumental ceramic tile mural installed at Gateway Station, a public work that reflects his belief that art belongs not only in museums, but in the shared spaces of daily life.
Romare Bearden did not set out to represent a people.
He set out to understand a world.
“Young Students”, Romare Bearden
Bearden’s life bridged eras, from the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement, from early modernism to late twentieth-century abstraction. Yet he resisted being claimed by any single moment or movement. His work insists on something larger.
Interconnection.
Bearden’s art is often described as collage, and materially, that description is accurate. Paper, photographs, fragments, color fields, and drawn lines coexist within his compositions. But collage, for Bearden, was not merely a technique. It was a worldview.
He understood culture as layered rather than linear. History did not replace itself. It accumulated. African traditions, European modernism, Southern memory, urban life, jazz, literature, ritual, and daily labor all existed simultaneously. His work does not sort these influences. It allows them to speak together.
That refusal to isolate experience is what gives Bearden’s work its power.
While he is now recognized as one of the most influential American artists of the twentieth century, Bearden spent much of his life working outside the spotlight. For decades, he supported himself as a social worker in New York City, balancing professional responsibility with an unwavering commitment to his studio practice.
That dual life was not a contradiction. It informed his art.
Bearden’s work is deeply human not because it romanticizes struggle, but because it understands it. He depicted ordinary life with extraordinary dignity. Interiors, street scenes, musicians, families, rituals, trains, and gatherings appear again and again, not as symbols to be decoded, but as lived realities worthy of sustained attention.
He once said that artists must “tell the truth as they see it.” For Bearden, that truth was never singular. It was plural, overlapping, and often unresolved.
His relationship with M. Bunch Washington reflects this philosophy. When Washington first encountered Bearden’s work, he recognized not only visual brilliance, but intellectual kinship. Bearden had arrived at conclusions Washington had studied theoretically, the interlocking nature of global cultures, the necessity of drawing from multiple histories without hierarchy.
“Three Folk Musicians”, Romare Bearden
Bearden, in turn, recognized Washington’s seriousness. He did not mentor casually. He invested where he saw rigor, discipline, and integrity.
Their friendship was not transactional. It was sustained by conversation, shared study, and mutual respect. Washington championed Bearden’s work through scholarship and persistence when institutions hesitated. Bearden offered Washington encouragement, critique, and affirmation, urging him to find and master his own artistic language.
This exchange matters because it complicates how we think about influence. Bearden was not simply a dominant figure pulling others into orbit. He was part of a network, a circle of artists who challenged and supported one another in the absence of institutional backing.
That absence shaped everything.
As Liz de Souza (Washington) has noted, African American artists of Bearden’s generation were not merely overlooked. They were actively blocked. Museums, galleries, publishers, and patrons operated within systems that limited access and visibility. Recognition, when it came, was often delayed or conditional.
Bearden understood this reality intimately. Yet he refused to let exclusion narrow his vision.
Instead, he expanded it.
His work draws freely from African sculpture, Byzantine icons, Renaissance painting, Cubism, jazz improvisation, and Southern folk traditions. These references are not citations. They are conversations. Bearden did not treat cultures as separate silos. He treated them as interconnected expressions of human creativity.
This approach was deeply political without being didactic.
By presenting the African American experience as universal rather than isolated, Bearden challenged the notion that Black life occupied the margins of American culture. His work insists that it is central, foundational, and inseparable from the broader human story.
Pittsburgh Recollections, 1984 (located at the Gateway Center “T” Station of the Pittsburgh Allegheny Rapid Transit Authority).
At the same time, Bearden resisted being labeled solely as a “Black artist.” Not out of denial, but out of principle. He understood the danger of tokenism, of being reduced to a category rather than recognized as an artist first.
That tension remains unresolved, and perhaps it should. Bearden’s work lives within it, acknowledging history without being confined by it.
There is also, in Bearden’s art, a profound sense of rhythm. His compositions move the way music moves. Jazz, especially, was a guiding force. Improvisation, repetition, variation, and syncopation shape his visual language. Forms echo one another. Figures repeat with difference. Time feels elastic.
This rhythmic structure mirrors life itself. Memory does not arrive in straight lines. It loops, overlaps, and returns.
Bearden trusted viewers to navigate this complexity. He did not simplify. He layered.
And yet, his work remains accessible. You do not need scholarly training to feel it. You need only to pause and allow the fragments to assemble themselves in your imagination.
In this way, Bearden’s work completes the arc begun earlier in this series.
Matisse taught us to stay with feeling before explanation.
Hockney asked us to reconstruct what we cannot see directly.
Liz de Souza reminded us why art matters at all, because it holds memory and responsibility.
M. Bunch Washington showed us how discipline and material can carry light forward.
Romare Bearden brings these threads together. His work does not resolve history. It holds it. It allows contradiction, complexity, and continuity to coexist.
That may be his greatest legacy.
Not answers, but a language spacious enough to contain them.
Sources and Context
Primary sources
Liz de Souza (Washington), interview with Mark Rengers, 2026
Liz de Souza (Washington) and Jesse Washington, archival stewardship and writings related to Romare Bearden and M. Bunch Washington via bunchwashington.com
Romare Bearden, selected writings, interviews, and correspondence
Founded in 1990, the Romare Bearden Foundation was established by the artist’s wife, Nanette Rohan Bearden.
Secondary and contextual sources
Mary Schmidt Campbell, An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Romare Bearden archives and exhibition materials
The Studio Museum in Harlem, Bearden scholarship and archival holdings
National Gallery of Art and Museum of Modern Art educational resources
Lowery Stokes Sims, essays on Bearden and institutional exclusion
Pittsburgh Recollections mural documentation, Pittsburgh Regional Transit (Gateway Station), 1984