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Welcome to the official website of The Romare Bearden Foundation. This site offers a wide range of resources and information on the art and life of preeminent African-American artist Romare Bearden.
Please explore our website, sign our e-mail list and learn about who we are and how you can support us. We invite you to visit this site often to learn more about Romare Bearden, one of America's foremost artists. Enjoy!

Photo by Marvin Newman.
Romare Howard Bearden (1911-1988). Recognized as one of the most creative and original visual artists of the twentieth century, the artist had a prolific and distinguished career.

The Romare Bearden Foundation was established as a nonprofit organization by the estate of Romare Bearden in 1990, two years after the artist died.
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The Romare Bearden Foundation hosts Fundraisers to promote the arts, and to support their education programs.
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In the news
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17 May
Cinque Artists Program at the Harlem School of Arts: Adrienne Elise Tarver
Read moreTuesday May 28, 2019 6:00 -8:00 pm FREE & OPEN to the public. “Artist Talk with Adrienne Elise Tarver” In her work, multimedia artist
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23 Mar
Cinque Artists Program at the Harlem School of Arts: Talk by scholar Camara Holloway
Read moreTuesday April 16, 2019 6:00 pm-8:00 pm Free and open to the public. “James L. Allen: Artist-Photographer of the Harlem Renaissance” Speaker Camara Holloway
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12 Feb
Cinque Artists Program at the Harlem School of Arts: A Celebration of the Nonprofit founded by Artists
Read moreThe Romare Bearden Foundation presents “The Legacy of Cinque Gallery” Tuesday February 26, 2019 6:00 pm-8:00 pm Harlem School of the Arts- 645
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08 Jan
Talk: Romare Bearden as Art Activist
Read moreReginald F. Lewis Museum -Saturday, January 12, 1:00 – 3:00pm Romare Bearden: Artist as Activist examines how an American artist agitated for change through the
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29 Nov
Romare Bearden featured at Art Fair
Read moreArt Basel Miami Beach -December 6-9, 2018 This year at Art Basel Miami Beach the DC Moore Gallery features a selection of Bearden's lesser known
Quotes
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I think the artist has to be something like a whale, swimming with his mouth open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs. When he finds that, he can start to make limitations. And then he really begins to grow.
Romare Bearden -
I felt that the Negro was becoming too much of an abstraction, rather than the reality that art can give a subject.
Romare Bearden, 1964 -
As a Negro I do not need to go looking for happenings, the absurd or the surreal, because I have seen things that neither Dali, Beckett, Ionesco, nor any of the others could have thought possible.
Romare Bearden, 1967 -
It is not my aim to paint about the Negro in America in terms of propaganda. It is to depict the life of my people as I know it, passionately and dispassionately as Brueghel. My intention is to reveal through pictorial complexities the life I know.
Romare Bearden -
I do not burden myself with the need for complete abstraction or absolute formal purity but I do want my language to be strict and classical, in the manner of the great Benin heads, for example.
Romare Bearden, 1969 -
I paint out of the tradition of the blues.
Romare Bearden, 1980