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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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Our Events
The Romare Bearden Foundation hosts events and fundraisers to promote the arts, and to support their educational programs.
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In the news
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29 Jun
Virtual Talk: A Dealer Tells Her Bearden Story
Read moreThursday, June 30, 6:30 pm (EST) via zoom Join us virtually as private art dealer Peg Alston tells her Bearden story of promoting the work of Bearden and
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25 Oct
New Graduate Museum Fellows
Read moreThe St. Louis Museum celebrates its newest Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellows for 2021. This Post Graduate Minority Fellowship was started in 1992 with the
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08 Sep
Fundraiser: A special evening with live auction and conversation
Read moreJoin us Friday, September 10 A few tickets are still available for this special ARTFUL evening! Conversation with Tschabalala Self, a Yale MFA graduate, currently enjoying
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02 Sep
Our Fundraisers
Read moreLooking back… A Garden Party Looking back on our Bearden Birthday Celebration for 2019, it was one for the records. We had a Garden Party
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01 Sep
HAPPY BIRTHDAY ROMARE BEARDEN -Sept 2, 1911
Read moreOn the occasion of the 110th birthday of Romare Bearden, we are celebrating the upcoming launch of our new YouTube Channel… BricolageTV A collage of
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