“I think the artist has to be something like a whale, swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.” Romare Bearden
The healing properties of the archetypes, aesthetics, and culture in the symbolism, iconography, the life and art of the master collagist, painter and printmaker Romare Bearden (1911 – 1988) will be explored. The artist archetype expressed in Romare Bearden’s journey through the African diaspora, posits that no artist of his generation better exemplifies the psychological depth and connection to the historiography of the African diaspora and to the rich culture of African-American psychology, history and art. The presentation illuminates the breadth and depth of Bearden’s aesthetics and imagination in his art, intellectual interests, pursuit of political consciousness and social activism. Influenced by the Harlem Renaissance, jazz, African and European aesthetics, Bearden as Griot, guides us through a rich complex maze of symbols, images, memories, metaphors, dreams, mythology, spiritualism, rituals, cosmology and symbology. He proposed an African – Black aesthetic and identity that has been excavated and reconstructed as a healing salve and celebration of life within the global framework and historiography of the African diaspora.
