Join us for a conversation between author Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Professor of History Emerita at Yale University, and Maya Brooks, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the NC Museum of Art, about Gilmore’s new book, Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination: An Artist’s Reckoning with the South. Books will be available for purchase.
Romare Bearden (1911–1988), one of the most prolific, original, and acclaimed American artists of the twentieth century, richly depicted scenes and figures rooted in the American South and the Black experience. Bearden hailed from North Carolina but was forced to relocate to the North when a white mob harassed his family in the 1910s. His family story is a compelling, complicated saga of Black middle-class achievement in the face of relentless waves of white supremacy. It is also a narrative of the generational trauma that slavery and racism inflicted over decades. But as Glenda Gilmore shows in this trenchant reappraisal of Bearden’s life and art, his work reveals deep imagination, extensive training, and a rich knowledge of art history.
