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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.
Our Mission
Photo by Frank Stewart
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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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10 May
Cinque Artists Talk Program: Yolène Legrand
Read moreThursday, May 18, 2023 from 6:00 -7:00 pm – Virtual on Zoom/Youtube/Facebook Free and open to the public. Register for the link through Eventbrite: https://bit.ly/44mrWnc
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14 Apr
Cinque Artists Talk Program: Willie Cole
Read moreWednesday, April 26, 2023 6:00 -7:00 pm – Virtual on Zoom/Youtube/Facebook The Cinque Artists Series welcomes multimedia artist Willie Cole, for a conversation about his
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25 Feb
Cinque Artists Talk with Ronnie Phillips
Read moreTuesday, March 7, 2023, 6:00 – 7:00 pm – Virtual on Zoom/Youtube/Facebook Register for the link through Eventbrite: https://bit.ly/41qyBev Free and open to the public.
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26 Jan
Cinque Artists Talk Program: A Conversation Celebrating Nanette Bearden
Read moreTuesday, January 31 2023 6:00 – 7:00 pm – Virtual on Zoom/Youtube/Facebook This event ended. Watch the recording on our Facebook page: https://fb.watch/ipvT5lXVti/
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06 Dec
Cinque Artists Talk Program: Charles Martin
Read moreThursday, December 15, 2022 6:00 – 7:00 pm – Virtual on Zoom/Youtube/Facebook This event ended. Please see the recording on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=701519401372622&id=100045437054592
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