The Romare Bearden Reader
An evening with the Author Robert G. O’Meally
Tuesday, March 10, 2020, 6pm
Columbia University Main Campus
Buell Hall, East Gallery
515 West 116th Street
New York, NY 10027
Event Description:
The Romare Bearden Reader (Duke, 2019) gathers the most significant interviews and occasional writings by this majorAfrican-American painter beside essays by leading poets, novelists, and art historians. Highlights of the volume include new essays by Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, Farah Jasmine Griffin and Brent Edwards as well as classic analyses of Bearden’s art by Elizabeth Alexander, August Wilson, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and Richard Powell. What’s new here is the intense focus on the capacity of Bearden’s art to influence other artists, visual and literary, and to help all of us see one another and our planet differently. Rich with global references and yet signed with his own style, Bearden’s art proclaims that we are all collages, as individuals and as communities. We are one and yet multiple. As such, not only are we fragmented, we are stitched together; not only are we torn and broken, we are richly layered with possibilities for mending and–to use a word frequently used by the artist–for redemption.
This event will be followed by a book sale and signing, with books provided by The Columbia Book Store.
This event is free and open to the public but registration is required.
This event is co-presented with The African American and African Diaspora Studies Department
