The Art of Romare Bearden, directed by Carroll Moore, narrated by Morgan Freeman -- Screenplay

THE ART OF ROMARE BEARDEN -- SCREENPLAY

directed by Carroll Moore, narrated by Morgan Freeman
A National Gallery of Art Presentation
© 2003 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington
All Romare Bearden images © Romare Bearden Foundation

The Art of Romare Bearden, directed by Carroll Moore -- Illustrated Screenplay & Screencap Gallery

The Art of Romare Bearden

Narrated by Morgan Freeman

Readings by Danny Glover

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] Romare Bearden was one of the most original American artists
of the twentieth century.
He is most famous for his collages.
He cut images from magazines and newspapers,
often adding other materials such as foil or fabric,
and pasted them onto a flat surface.
Sometimes he would paint and draw over them,
creating a highly detailed surface,
rich and intricate in form.
The abrupt jumps and cuts,
texture,
complex juxtapositions,
and various sources of collage,
appealed to him.
As a man and as an artist,
he came to terms with a life full of diverse influences
that like a collage,
never conformed to a seamless narrative.

[Ruth Fine, National Gallery of Art] He uses ideas and materials
and processes
in a way
that nobody else
quite used them.
He's also important
because he embraced the whole of human culture,
and he understood it,
and tried to embed all of that in his art,
while he also was portraying the world
that he knew personally.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] Romare Bearden was born in 1911
in Charlotte, North Carolina.
His family, like so many others,
moved north to New York when he was very young.
Two very different worlds --
the pulsating tempo of urban life,
and the agrarian rhythms and rituals of the south --
would figure in his art throughout his life.

[Romare Bearden] The function of the artist is to organize the facets of life according to his imagination.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] Bearden grew up in Harlem,
the capital of black America in the 1920s.
His father Howard
worked for the city's sanitation department;
mother Bessye became a journalist,
and prominent political activist.

[Dr. Richard Powell, Art Historian, Duke University] Bearden was very lucky
and fortunate to be in the family
that he was in. Having a mother
who was a society columnist,
having solid middle-class connections on one hand,
but also having family members who were plugged in
to the kind of cultural, intellectual life
of a community like Harlem ...
It was a great advantage for him.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] They were at the center of the Harlem Renaissance.
Family friends included Langston Hughes,
Paul Robeson,
W.E.B. Du Bois,
and Duke Ellington.
Bearden gravitated slowly to a career in art.
He began flirting with political cartooning
at Boston University in the '30s,
where he pursued a degree
and pitched for the baseball team.
After moving back home,
he got a B.A. in Education at New York University in 1935
and took a job
in the city's Department of Social Services,
while contributing cartoons to the "Afro-American,"
a Baltimore newspaper.
For the next 30 years, art was a part-time pursuit,
but always his full-time vocation.

[Romare Bearden] The artist has to be something like a whale, swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] He took a night course with George Grosz
at the Art Students League
where the German expatriate artist
introduced his students to the history of European art,
from Duccio
to Picasso.
Grosz probably introduced him to assemblage
and photomontage --
techniques that he and other modernists like Hannah Hoch explored.
Those lessons would emerge in Bearden's work years later.
His work in the 1930s and early '40s
reflected his interest in social realism
and the murals of Mexican artist Diego Rivera.
He shared that interest with Hale Woodruff
and other artists in the 306 group
who took their name
from a studio they rented in a former stable
at 306 West 141st Street in Harlem.
But Bearden looked at everything,
from the work of New Yorker Stuart Davis,
to the African sculpture
exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1935.
Bearden had already begun to contemplate
the role of the African American artist.
In a 1934 essay he titled,
"The Negro Artist and Modern Art,"
he argued that black artists
should stop seeking out foreign subjects
and interpret the rich variety of their own experiences.
But over the next decade,
Bearden's thinking and painting evolved.
He argued that African-American artists
should feel free to seek inspiration from all cultures.

[Bearden Portrayer] There is no single characteristic
that would stamp individual works
as having been done by a Negro.
However disinherited,
the Negro is part of the amalgam of American life,
and his aims and aspirations are in common
with the rest of the American people.
The Negro artist must think of himself
not primarily as a Negro artist,
but as an artist.

[Myron Schwartzman, Biographer] There was something
truly apolitical in him.
I mean, he was political
all right, he thought.
But he wasn't political
for any particular segment of society.
I remember pretty clearly
that when he was asked by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund
to do a poster,
he told me that he had chosen
a woman reading a book, you know,
because to him that was the essence
of what they were asking about.
That was what was going to have political power.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] A profound sense of the artist's need
to range widely in search of inspiration
remained a touchstone for Bearden.
His studio in the Apollo theater building,
where he worked in the 1940s,
featured a reproduction of Paul Cezanne's "Card Players."
Years later it was a model
for Bearden's version of the subject.
"Artist with Painting and Model"
catches a sense of the importance
of both African and European influences.
His drawing of an African mask,
and a photograph of a 14th century Italian painting.
are given equal prominence.

[Dr. Richard Powell, Art Historian, Duke University] I would say
that Romy Bearden's double consciousness
is less a conflicted phenomena,
and more something that allows him to speak and operate
and move in various circles,
and to be most effective
when one is in those different circles.
For example, his connections with Harlem.
He knew those musicians and those artists,
and those people on the streets.
But he could also operate
in more intelligentsia-type settings,
with writers and with philosophers,
and with scholars and the like.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] Wartime service in the Army didn't interrupt his art.
Sergeant Bearden's work in the '40s
was shown at both group and individual shows.
In 1945, he joined the Samuel Kootz gallery
on East 57th Street,
where Alexander Calder and Robert Motherwell
also showed their work.
His style shifted dramatically towards abstraction.
Cubism's fractured geometrical forms and shapes
began to appear in his work,
including a 1946 painting
that revealed an interest in Pablo Picasso's "Guernica."
But Bearden was out of phase
with the rising tide of abstract expressionism.
In 1948, he was dropped by the Kootz gallery.
He went to Paris on the G.I. Bill in 1950
to recharge his batteries,
meeting other American artists
like the writer Albert Murray.

[Albert Murray, Writer] This guy was talking low,
and every now and then,
this light-skinned guy would chuckle.
And then finally the guy said
something very funny,
and Romy exploded in a good North Carolina laugh.
I said, "That's a down home guy."
That summer was like graduate school for us.
We were all thinking about what we were going to do with it
when we came back home.
And for Romy, he was a student of the arts,
and he was seeing all the great pictures of the Louvre,
and various other places,
looking at the shape of Paris, enjoying Paris.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] Back home,
the continued success of abstract expressionism
led Bearden to explore more fully
its visual possibilities.
But pure painterly abstraction was a cul-de-sac for him.
Bearden, nearing 40, was at a crossroads.
He began to write popular songs in the 1950s,
and he was successful.
Billy Eckstine had a hit with "Sea Breeze,"
and Leslie Uggams recorded "Missus Santa Claus."
He married Nanette Rohan in 1954,
and with the encouragement of his wife and friends,
he rededicated himself to painting.

[Romare Bearden] The artist confronts chaos. The whole thing of art is, how do you organize chaos?

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] In early July 1963,
the month before Martin Luther King's march on Washington,
several African-American painters
met in Bearden's Canal Street studio
to consider the role of black artists
in the struggle for civil rights.
The group took the name "Spiral,"
a reference to their evolution outwards and upwards
from a center of common interests.
Bearden suggested they work on a collective project --
a collage.

[Emma Amos, Artist] He brought all of his
clippings and little delicate
cutout things that he had done,
and he put them on the floor for us to look at,
because he wanted us to work with them.
And everybody just looked at these things and said,
"You want us to do what with them?"
And the end result was
he took these beautiful cutouts,
of black and white and color and what not,
and that became the series that made him famous.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] Unlike his colleagues,
Bearden was stimulated by the possibilities of collage.
In a series of small-scale works,
he created densely populated images such as "The Street."
Bearden's collages took on another form
when he graphically enlarged them
on a photostat machine,
thereby creating visual epics of African-American experience.
The large scale works were titled "Projections."
Bearden exhibited some of the photostatic Projections
at the Cordier & Eckstrom gallery in 1964,
and in the 1965 Spiral exhibition,
which featured works in black and white only --
a decision that allowed the artists to engage technical concerns
as well as racial themes.

[Myron Schwartzman, Biographer] They seemed to capture the times.
Everything was getting written out in black and white after all,
politically, in lots of other ways.
And so they were quite appealing to a lot of people.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] At this time, Bearden also began to use
photographs of African sculpture in his collages.
He used Benin heads
among the mix of figures in "Sermons. Walls of Jericho."
Other works incorporated the strong features in masks
made by the Dan peoples of the Ivory Coast and Liberia.

[Dr. Richard Powell, Art Historian, Duke University] People who see these works
can pick out and understand that he's using the African mask.
At the same time they understand
that they are not to be read strictly as African masks,
but as some sort of kind of collage
and reconceptualization of that spirit
in this new world context,
in this modern context.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] Bearden explained
that he used fragments of masks from different regions
because when enslaved people were brought from Africa,
they came from various ethnic groups.

[Dr. Richard Powell, Art Historian, Duke University] He's juxtaposing the fragments of these masks
with actual photographs of real people --
their body parts,
their eyes, their noses, their mouths,
from "Ebony" magazine,
from "Life" magazine and "Look" magazine.
And he's assembling these images
and putting them into his kind of quintessential environments:
his southern environments, his Harlem environments,
and he's making a larger statement as a result of that.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] Through the technique of collage,
Bearden had found his artistic voice.

[Emma Amos, Artist] He did all sorts of things with them.
What you saw, after you saw them put together,
was that he had chosen people's faces,
and to make assemblage
of pieces of faces and pieces of bodies,
so that he was creating a whole new almost cubist form.
It's not even almost.
I think it was really very much influenced by cubism.
And these were new things that he was making,
new forms that you just hadn't seen before.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] The collages established Bearden as a major artist.
By the end of the '60s, he was able to quit his day job
and turn full time to his art.
He would remain with the prestigious Cordier & Ekstrom gallery
for the rest of his life.

[Romare Bearden] If you're any kind of an artist you make a miraculous journey and you come back and make some statements in shapes and colors of where you were.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] Romare Bearden's life,
filtered through his memory and imagination,
was the cornerstone of his art.
Although he left Charlotte as a small child,
the African-American culture of the city,
and the small towns of Mecklenburg County,
percolated through his sensibility.
His memories of homes
wallpapered with magazines and newspapers,
and the quilting bees he'd seen there,
worked their way into his art.
He grafted his own recollections of these rural traditions
onto the European technique of collage.
Bearden's return to Charlotte to visit relatives in 1940
opened his eyes to Mecklenburg County
and the culture of rural American life.
It also unleashed a flood of nostalgia and memories
that surfaced in his work throughout his career.

[Myron Schwartzman, Biographer] He remembered a railroad bridge
very near his great grandfather's home.
And he remembered the sound of the trains and the roosters,
and the countryside scenes you see.
But when he went back, he felt lost,
and he felt the loss.
And I suppose that was the reason
he kept on recreating it in his art.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] In his periodic visits down south,
Bearden witnessed religious rituals
that would emerge in his work of the 1960s and '70s.
He painted scenes inspired by
the solemn processions on Palm Sunday,
and the spirited revivals of the holiness churches.
He also explored the image of the conjure woman --
a figure he defined as
important in southern Negro rural communities,
called on to provide herbs to cure various illnesses,
and to be consulted regarding vexing personal problems.
Bearden's collages convey his feeling
that the conjure woman was both feared and respected.
Trains are among the most prevalent images in Bearden's work --
the engines that sped southern blacks,
including the Bearden family,
north, away from the Jim Crow laws,
and toward the promise of a better life.

[Wynton Marsalis, Musician] There are many trains
in the southern mythology,
in the south.
One is the literal train
that would take you from one place to another.
You always hear, "whoo ... whoo ...
cannup, cannup, cannup, cannup, cannup, cannup."
Then there's the rhythm of the train.
It's the sound of swing --
"ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, di, di, di, di."
It is the sound
what we call the gospel train,
which is the spiritual train, the metaphysical train.
That rhythm is "doon, do, do, doon,
do do do doon, do do, doon,
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12,
do, di diddle do, do diddle do, do diddle do."
So the train has a great deal of significance
in Afro-American mythology.
Also the sound of the horn,
"wah, wah, wah, wah, wah ..."
It's like a train whistle.
Sound of the brushes on the drums --
that's a train whistle.
A lot of trains, a lot of train whistles.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] In works like "Train Whistle Blues,"
and "Tomorrow I May Be Far Away,"
Bearden also suggested that pain of loss and separation
inherent in leaving home.
In the late 1920s, when Bearden was a teenager,
he lived for a short time with his maternal grandparents in Pittsburgh --
at the end of another train line,
bringing southern blacks toward the hope of a better life.
The Iron City's industrial landscape
began to take shape in collages in the 1960s.
His adolescent memories of the people and the city
intertwine with mementos and other times and places.

[Ruth Fine, National Gallery of Art] His social conscience was, to some extent, I think,
developed in Pittsburgh,
a sympathy with the workers that he was more engaged with.
It's as if there was a different kind of urban toughness
in Pittsburgh.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] Bearden's imagination didn't observe
the documentary boundaries of time and space.
In the collage "Pittsburgh Memories,"
finished in 1984,
he merged his memories of the past --
the belching smoke stacks of the Iron City,
the rolling hills of Meklenburg County --
with the record player bringing the sounds of Harlem.
Romare Bearden's art and his life
flourished in New York's rich cultural mix.
He painted Harlem's streets,
and peered into the interiors behind them.
Conflicts, disappointments, and dreams
engaged his eye and imagination.
And he captured the allure of Manhattan's verve and beauty.
Harlem's jazz clubs and theaters --
the Lafayette, the Savoy, the Apollo --
were venues that Bearden frequented in the 1940s and '50s,
and subjects for his paintings in the '70s.
They were inspired by popular musicians and singers,
such as Billie Holiday.
He transposed the nuances of the music into color,
using it as a metaphor
for the improvisations and subtleties of the music.
But jazz also had a profound impact on his working method.

[Romare Bearden] You put down one color, and it calls for an answer. You have to look at it like a melody."

[Wynton Marsalis, Musician] Call and response is a basic way that music is exposed, not just jazz.
You listen to Beethoven's symphonies, it's always call and response.
In jazz, we have many more calls and responses
that take place in a shorter framework, shorter span of time,
because everybody's improvising,
and they're all listening to one another.
So somebody does one thing,
and then everybody tries to respond in that way.
With Romare's work,
it's always done with figures.
Like one person is doing one thing,
and then there'll be a response to that somewhere down on the page
that balances that.
One hand goes up,
another hand goes off to the side.
One leg goes up, another head comes forward.
So he's always dealing with a call and response of figures,
a juxtaposition of colors,
then a call and response of ideas,
then ultimately the call and response between him and the viewer.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] His lifelong interest in jazz, and his growing stature,
would later lead him to design album covers,
including one for the trumpeter Donald Byrd.
Wynton Marsalis asked him to create a cover for "J Mood."

[Wynton Marsalis, Musician] I asked him if he could do an album cover for me,
and he said he would do it, but the only way he would do it
was if I came to his studio on Canal Street every day.
So when I would come, he would work on it,
and when I left, he wouldn't work on it.
He made a man playing a trumpet,
with a woman coming out of it with a garter.
I noticed just a lot of different things,
like he tore the purple just to make the woman's hair,
and then he balanced it with the white,
with the little white stripe underneath her leg
supporting her.
And just the flow of it, the syncopation of it,
the romance of it ...
The way it has the feeling of jazz.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] By the 1970s,
Bearden's works had become more open and less dense,
reflecting the lessons he'd learned
from the work of Henri Matisse.
He turned away from newsprint
to plain, brightly colored paper,
combining vibrant colors,
with flatter and more simplified forms.

[Romare Bearden] I try to incorporate some of the techniques of documentary film or the camera eye into the art of painting.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] Bearden's collages grew larger and more ambitious
as his technique became more confident.
In the early '70s,
he created two of his most memorable works --
"The Block" and "The Block II" --
a view of Harlem street he'd glimpsed
from Albert Murray's balcony.

[Albert Murray, Writer] He knew what the language of contemporary painting was,
and what he could do with it as an individual,
and that individual included raw material
that was from his personal life and background.
But he's going to speak the language of the time,
and see if he could add something to it.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] Berkeley, California, commissioned a mural
for the city council chamber
that would document the city and its history.
The 16-foot-long paper collage,
completed in 1973,
combines the city's iconic images --
The University of California's bell tower
and the San Francisco Bay Bridge --
with images of the city's long history
of protest and scholarship.

[Ruth Fine, National Gallery of Art] It's early evidence of just the amount of research
that he would do into a complicated project like that,
because embedded in it
is not only all of contemporary Berkeley,
its politics, its architecture,
it's multiple aspects of humanity,
but Berkeley culture.
And this is something that Bearden repeated
throughout his life.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] Bearden completed another commission in 1976
for the African American Museum of Philadelphia.
"Captivity and Resistance"
depicts the 1839 rebellion led by Joseph Cinque
aboard the slave ship "Amistad."
In the 1970s,
the Beardens began to spend more and more time
on the Caribbean island of St. Martin,
the family home of his wife Nanette.
They built a house in 1973,
and eventually added a studio.
The island's lush, tropical flora and fauna
became a subject for Bearden
in the latter years of his career.
The intense colors and the tranquility
inspired him to explore landscape, nature, and seasons.
He began working in a more painterly style,
using watercolor,
perhaps because it is a more portable medium
than the collage technique.

[Ruth Fine, National Gallery of Art] His stays in the Caribbean
certainly introduced landscape into his art
in an important way.
First, in the early years,
for the most part as a background for figures.
But eventually as a subject in itself.
One of the things
that's always interested me about the Caribbean pictures
is their density.
It's as if he went
from an interest in the density of the city,
taking all of the details he could find
in an environment such as that.
And when he went to the Caribbean,
looked for the kinds of details
he would find in the Caribbean.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] Bearden's art
began to become part of the American landscape.
His works appeared in "Time" magazine,
and "TV Guide" commissioned him to produce a cover
when the landmark television series "Roots"
made its debut in 1977.
The honors continued.

[Nancy Reagan] The "New York Times" wrote of his 1986 retrospective,
that "Bearden's tapestries
are about memory and forgetting,
wisdom and laughter, silence and song."
Mr. Bearden.

[Narrator Morgan Freeman] Ronald Reagan presented him
with the National Medal for the Arts in 1987.
But Bearden, now in his mid '70s,
was suffering from the bone cancer that would end his life.
Bearden's long career
as an artist who moved freely between
the remembered worlds of his youth
and the re-imagined worlds of New York and the Caribbean,
ended in 1988.
But he continues to intrigue both artists and audiences.

[Dr. Richard Powell, Art Historian, Duke University] It's memory,
but it's memory that has been distilled.
But it's been distilled through memories
of certain kinds of sounds and sensory effects
that he's getting from Harlem.

[Myron Schwartzman, Biographer] He had checked out everything,
he had studied everything he did,
but he came out like a musician
and did it improvisationally.

[Emma Amos, Artist] He was using color and he was using images.
They were almost like iconic images,
they were things that you wanted to see,
but had never seen.

CREDITS

Narrated by Morgan Freeman

Readings by Danny Glover

A production of the Department of Exhibition Programs, National Gallery of Art

This film was made possible by the HRH Foundation

With special thanks to
Emma Amos
Ruth Fine
Wynton Marsalis
Albert Murray
Richard Powell
Romare Bearden Foundation
Myron Schwartzman
Deborah Ziska

The exhibition The Art of Romare Bearden was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington

The exhibition is made possible with generous support from AT&T

Written, directed and produced by Carroll Moore

Executive Producer: Susan M. Arensberg
Curatorial Consultant: Ruth Fine
Assistant Curators: Lynn Kellmanson Matheny, Michelle Joan Wilkinson
Photograph and film research: Elizabeth Laitman Hughes
Project Coordinator: Emily H. Quinn
Cinematography: Dave Drum, Rob Lyall, Richard Numeroff
Archival film research: Bonnie G. Rowan
Music Clearances: Darla Decker
Sound Recordists: John Conway, John Duvall, Sean O'Neill
Editors: Serge Ohana, Miguel Mir
Motion Control Photography: Burle Cherney
Sound Designer: Karl Kalbaugh
Graphics: Todd Gardner
Project assistance also provided by: Jennifer Cipriano, Mary Lee Corlett, Carmenita Higginbotham, Jennifer Overton, Karen Sagstetter, Sara Sanders-Buell, Claire Yearwood
Post-production facilities provided by: Georgetown Post, The Park Group

Additional thanks to:
Berkeley City Council
Baruch College
Steve Crump
Dorothe Rohan Dow
Josianne Fleming-Artsen
Diedra Harris-Kelley
Ronald David Jackson
Richard Maschal
Mary Ann Merker
Roland Richardson
Sheila Rohan
XM Satellite Radio

Special thanks is extended to the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, for assistance with this project
Film footage courtesy of Ernie Smith Jazz Film Collection, Archives, Center, National Museum of American History, National Archives and Records Administration, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library

Photographs courtesy of
African American Museum in Philadelphia
Afro-American Newspaper Archives and Research Center
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, R.T. Miller, Jr. Fund
Billie Allen
Mary Ellen Andrews
Archives of American Art, The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
© 2003 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Estate of Romare Bearden, courtesy of the Romare Bearden Foundation, New York
City of Berkeley, California, Public Art Collection
Collection Merrill C. Berman
Yearbook Office, Boston University
Collections at Boston University
Bryn Mawr College Collections, Pennsylvania
Roy R. Neuberger Collection
Dr. Donald Byrd
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ronald R. Davenport and Mr. and Mrs. Milton A. Washington, Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
© Cleveland Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund
Columbia Records
Nancy Crampton
Robert & Faye Davidson, Los Angeles, California
© Estate of Stuart Davis/Licensed by VAGA, NY
Collection of Professor and Mrs. David C. Driskell
© Giraudon/Art Resource, NY (ARS)
Priscilla T. Grace, Promised gift to the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Laura Grosch and Herb Jackson
David A. Hagelstein, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
Collection of halley k. harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld, New York
Harry Henderson
Chester Higgins Jr. All Rights Reserved
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, photograph by Lee Stalsworth
Honolulu Academy of Arts, gift of Geraldine P. Clark, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; gift of Jane and Raphael Bernstein
Collection of Earle Hyman
Stephane Janssen, Arizona
Marian B. Javits
Robert L. Johnson from The Barnett-Aden Collection, Washington, D.C.
Jack Krumholz, Courtesy ACA Galleries, New York
Lent in memory of Elaine Lebenbom
Mr. Keith Lee and Dr. Lor Andochick
© Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY (ARS)
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
Wynton Marsalis
© 2003 Succession H. Matisse, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Yvonne and Richard McCracken
Collection of Raymond J. McGuire
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY
Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Friends of Art and African American Art Acquisition Fund
Dr. David H. Moore
Jim Mosley
National Gallery of Art, Washington
National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution
Norton Museum of Art
© 2003 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Jim Rudin, Yellow Poui Art Gallery, Grenada, W.I.
© Scala / Art Resource, NY
© Schalkwijk / Art Resource, NY
The Collection of Philip J. and Suzanne Schiller, American Social Commentary Art 1930-1970
Sam Shaw photographs courtesy Shaw Family Archives
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Henry Ward Ranger through the National Academy of Design
Ann and Harold Sorgenti
Frank Stewart
© John Bigelow Taylor / Art Resource, NY (ARS)
The Thompson Collection, Indianapolis, Indiana
Time Life Pictures / Getty Images
Tougaloo College Art Collections, Mississippi
TV Guide Magazine Group
Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina
The Walter O. Evans Foundation for Art and Literature
Collection of George and Joyce Wein

"Jelly Roll Blues" written by Jelly Roll Morton, published by MPL Communications Inc., performed by Jelly Roll Morton, Cincinnati, OH, November, 1924, courtesy of Biograph Records, Inc.
"Sea Breeze" written by Rommie Bearden, Larry Douglas, and Fred Norman, published by Laerteas Music Company,. performed by Tito Puente, New York, NY, February, 1957, courtesy of Koch Jazz / BMG Music

Return to Table of Contents