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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 events and fundraisers to promote the arts, and to support their educational programs.
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Romare Bearden's Southern Sensibility by Wide Iris Productions
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In the news
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30 Nov
Check your favorite non-profits off your holiday list!
Read moreGIVING TUESDAY IS TOMORROW! We know you don’t only support on “Giving Tuesday”, but it’s a moment to check-in on all your favorite non-profits. Your
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01 Oct
THE PREVALENCE OF RITUAL – A Discussion on Bearden & Legacy
Read moreTUESDAY October 27, 2020 at 3:00 pm (EST) In celebration of the launch of the Romare Bearden Digital Catalogue Raisonné the Wildenstein-Plattner Institute hosts a
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02 Sep
LAUNCHING NEW PROJECT ON BEARDEN – The Romare Bearden Digital Catalogue Raisonne Project
Read moreHAPPY BIRTHDAY ROMARE BEARDEN (September 2, 1911) On the occasion of the 109th birthday of Romare Bearden we are celebrating the launch of a new
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02 Jun
Cinque Artists Program with Camara Holloway & Elizabeth Way
Read moreThe Romare Bearden Foundation presents: “Putting' on the Ritz: Fashion and the Harlem Renaissance" The Virtual Visual Conversation with Camara Holloway & Elizabeth Way Tuesday,
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13 Feb
ABSTRACT Romare Bearden
Read moreOPENING TODAY 6-8 pm February 13 On view through March 28, 2020 – DC Moore Gallery presents “Abstract Romare Bearden” an exhibition featuring rarely-seen stain
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