CHARLOTTE, N.C. — For someone so closely associated with Charlotte and the South, famed artist Romare Bearden spent precious little time here.
In fact, his parents fled the city when a white mob targeted them in 1915 during the Jim Crow era. They took their young son to Pittsburgh, part of the Great Migration of Southern Black families to the North in the early 20th century. Later, they settled in Harlem, where Bearden would be ensconced in the Harlem Renaissance.
He only returned to Charlotte a few times over the years. But the city, along with the South itself, would repeatedly figure into Bearden’s work throughout the decades. By the time he died in 1988 at age 76, Bearden was secure in the firmament of 20th century artists.
He’s also well represented in his hometown, from Romare Bearden Park in uptown Charlotte to the Mint Museum having one of the most extensive collections of Bearden’s work of any museum in the country, nearly 60 pieces.
A new biography explores Bearden’s life, art and ties to the region: “Romare Bearden in the Homeland of his Imagination: An Artist’s Reckoning with the South” (UNC Press, $40. ) It’s by Glenda Gilmore, a professor of history emerita at Yale University who lived in Charlotte from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Gilmore recently spoke with The Charlotte Observer about her book, and added a few thoughts via email. Answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: Talk to me about what you meant by the title, “Romare Bearden in the Homeland of his Imagination.”
A: He left Charlotte when he was 4 or 5. The family walked two or three blocks (from their Graham Street home), and his mother was in a store. Romare (was light-skinned and) was dressed as a little girl. Boy toddlers were often dressed as girls back then. And a mob surrounded his dad, thinking he had kidnapped a little white girl. So the family left (town) traumatically and quickly.
(Yet Bearden later set a lot of his work around Charlotte.) And those visual images come back to him, but he doesn’t have a lot of context for them. He sort of conjures up memories of his visual memories, and of the South in general. He says, “I’m not remembering.” He’s calling out to the past, and it answers. So I think it’s a homeland of his imagination. And what an imagination he has.
Q: So why did Charlotte and Mecklenburg County retain such a strong hold on his work?
A: He lived in a family compound, with his great-grandparents Henry and Rosa Kennedy, his grandmother Cattie Bearden and his parents, Bessye and Howard Bearden. His family was well-connected, people were in and out of the (Kennedys’ grocery) store. His great-grandfather spent a lot of time with him. They were wonderful people, and he was one of them. And after that (incident with the racist mob, he) moved three times in the next two or three years. So I think he remembers it as a happy time of his childhood. He said, “I never left Charlotte, except physically.”
I always thought that Bearden wanted to reclaim Charlotte, and what the family had lost from having to leave Charlotte, and how truncated the promise of his family became with segregation. I think he wanted to reclaim all of that possibility.
Q: I thought it ironic that the family moving North gave Bearden opportunities he might not have had if he had remained in Charlotte, from his art training to being part of the Harlem Renaissance.
A: His family was very successful again in New York. His mother was the deputy internal revenue officer for New York City, she was political, connected to the arts. (Bearden) was a pallbearer for the president of the NAACP when he was in his 20s. He knew Langston Hughes. It was just a feast of riches.
Q: Let’s talk about his work in collage. You noted it really gave Bearden the ability to narrate Black life with the themes of history, religion, ritual and myth all meshing together.
A: He’s telling us a story in the collages, which is difficult to do if you are using watercolors or something like that. He was just a master of collage, and it made him happy.
Q: Your book has a lot of details about the paintings that involved life around Charlotte. I was hoping you’d talk a bit about a couple of them.
A: He painted urban gardens, and in a series of paintings called “Profile,” one of his most famous collages was of Maudell Sleet. One thing that happens is that Bearden became very good friends with (writer and music critic) Albert Murray, who is very Southern. And Murray would evoke from him these memories of the South, and would sit with him when he was painting.
I was determined to find Maudell Sleet in Charlotte, but she wasn’t there. There was a woman down the street from (the Beardens) named Maude Slade, and I think it was Maude Slade who kept the garden. So looking at “Profile/Part I, the Twenties: Sunset and Moonrise with Maudell Sleet,” which he did in 1978, really typifies for me so many things about Bearden’s attention to detail and collage. There’s a little hill behind the Southern Railway in Charlotte that (the Bearden family) could see a mountain in the background. She’s wearing a straw hat and her hands are enormous. Bearden said hands signify, and Maudell Sleet’s hands are just testaments to capability. She’s able to grow things in uptown, or downtown, Charlotte.
Q: Yeah, we still call it uptown.
A: She’s gone out to tend her garden at sunset, moonrise, at the cool of the evening, when you can go out and work in the garden without expiring in the Charlotte heat in the summer. Albert Murray says, that’s not Maudell Sleet’s garden. And Bearden says to him that was her. To me that brings up everything. His mixed-up memories of who that might’ve been. And it just encapsulates a world that we’ve lost, a world where you could live in uptown Charlotte, and have a garden, and be prosperous through your own hands.
Q: That’s great. Do you want to talk about another one?
A: Sure. I love this one; let’s do “Of the Blues: Mecklenburg County, Saturday Night,” from 1974. It’s got that movement that he’s so good at putting into such a static medium. The woman who’s dancing is wearing a shortish skirt for the time. Looking at her skirt, that looks like the continent of Africa on it. She’s having a great time. The guy beside her is wearing green overalls, so it’s clear we’re in a rural area, even before we see the shack. The musicians are playing a harmonica, playing a trumpet.
I love the guy who sort of looks like what they used to call a sheikh in the ‘20s. He’s doing the lean, he’s dancing, he’s dressed up for this rural party. The other great thing is the audience is playing too. And it’s just Saturday night. And you know this happened. I’m not sure whether Bearden ever saw it or not. That’s the amazing thing. He wasn’t old enough to go to a juke joint.
Q: Not at 4 years old.
A: Or even when he came back (briefly) at age 9. So it’s his imagination. And what an imagination. It could’ve happened. It looked like it did happen.
Q: In another collage, “Watching the Good Trains Go By,” what stood out to me was the train motif that Bearden returned to time and again in memories of Charlotte.
A: Throughout his life, Bearden often framed his compositions to resemble the view from his great-grandparents’ front porch at 401 S. Graham St. Here, you can see the foothills across the Southern Railway tracks, the Magnolia Cotton Mill across the street and the train that ran on the elevated track from South Boulevard to the main line. Bearden’s family could tell the good trains, the fast, passenger ones, by their whistles.
The Great Migration is underway and the pensive people in the collage are thinking of getting on that train. Some are barefoot, as Southerners often were in the summer, and a soap kettle sits in the yard. The man with his back turned is leaving, perhaps wearing his World War I uniform. The itinerant folk musician, ready to strum, catches trains from town to town.
Q: In “Of the Blues: Carolina Shout” from 1974, you see religious themes.
A: Carolina Shout is a take on an earlier work entitled “Baptism” showing the rapturous exuberance of sinners and saints at an outdoor baptism. He uses a diffuse palate of blues and greens to convey spirituality. Members of the congregation are overcome by the spirit; they shout and throw up their hands. Despite the fixed nature of collage, Bearden shows movement’s chaos and uses electrifying color to convey excitement. The minister who is baptizing the boy points his enormous, steady hand toward Heaven. Hands signify in Bearden’s work, and he uses them to portray character and emotion.
Q: Finally, let’s talk about “Moonlight Prelude.” What struck me here, on this collage he finished 100 days before he died, was the return of that iconic train trestle.
A: And the train is so big here. You know, often the train is more in the background. This is about the train. He knew he was dying. It’s a prelude. Prelude to what? I think he’s naming it about his own impending death and the train is coming for him. The great thing about Bearden is he invites you to tell stories.
And this is everything Bearden loves. Folk musician music, a beautiful woman, the train is coming for him. It’s a good train. His great-granddaddy, (who was a federal railway mail service worker) taught him the difference between the good trains and the local trains. It’s his whole life, right there.
