Piecing Together a New Reality

Romare Bearden’s “The Train” (1975) – A striking collage reflecting the themes of migration, identity, and the African American journey through a dynamic interplay of color, texture, and fragmented imagery.

What if the act of cutting and pasting images could challenge societal norms and reconstruct cultural identities? 

For Romare Bearden, collage was not merely an artistic technique—it was a profound method of storytelling and a tool for social commentary. In an age fractured by displacement, migration, systemic racism, and cultural transformation, Bearden reached for scissors and paper to reassemble the pieces. His medium wasn’t just visual—it was philosophical. With collage, Bearden didn’t simply depict the African American experience; he reframed it, re-layered it, and imbued it with rhythm, ritual, and resistance.

With abstraction and figuration often seen as oppositional forces in the art world, Bearden transformed collage—a medium often dismissed as decorative—into a powerful engine of cultural critique and historical reconstruction. His work gives us more than images. It gives us a way of seeing.

Through his innovative collages, Bearden reimagined the African-American experience, intertwining personal memories with collective history to create a new visual language that continues to inspire artists today.​

Collage as Cultural Method: A Language of Assembly

Collage is not just an art form. It’s a worldview. For Bearden, it offered a vocabulary of interruption, contradiction, and reconciliation—a way to make meaning from fragments in a world that so often seeks to erase or distort Black history and identity.

Bearden’s practice of assembling photographs, torn papers, textures, fabrics, and painted elements into unified compositions mirrored the African American experience: one of displacement met with reformation, of identities formed under constraint yet bursting with creativity. His characters are often framed mid-motion—stepping into trains, standing at thresholds, playing instruments—caught between histories and geographies.

In works like The Block (1971), Bearden transforms everyday Harlem street life into a sprawling six-panel epic. Layered storefronts, barbershops, tenement windows, and church steps form an urban symphony. Each panel feels like a stanza in a long poem—sometimes quiet, sometimes loud, always building. The effect is not just visual storytelling; it’s communal memory refracted through paper and glue.

“The Block” (1971) by Romare Bearden – A masterful collage capturing the rhythm and energy of Harlem, with fragmented yet cohesive scenes of daily life, community, and cultural identity.

Influences: Cubism, Photomontage, and Black Southern Consciousness

Bearden’s landmark series—where memory, myth, and Black life converge in collage.

Bearden’s approach didn’t emerge in a vacuum. He was deeply influenced by modernist techniques—particularly Cubism and Dadaist photomontage. Like Picasso, he fractured the human figure into geometric forms, allowing multiple perspectives to coexist in a single frame. From German Dadaists like Hannah Höch, he absorbed the radical potential of cutting and recontextualizing printed imagery.

But unlike his European predecessors, Bearden infused these forms with the soulful weight of the Black experience. He rooted his aesthetic in the soil of his own life: growing up in North Carolina, spending formative years in Harlem, absorbing blues, jazz, gospel, and Southern folklore.

In Prevalence of Ritual (1964), a series of collages and photostat prints, Bearden draws on biblical imagery, African traditions, and Black American history to create archetypal scenes—baptisms, train stations, family meals—that echo the rhythms of the rural South and the pulse of Northern cities. These weren’t just personal memories; they were communal rituals, rendered sacred through repetition and reinterpretation.

Fragmentation and Reassembly: A Postwar Aesthetic of Survival

Romare Bearden’s “Train Whistle Blues No. 1” (1964) – A photostat collage capturing the rhythm and emotion of blues music through a depiction of African American musicians.

In the wake of WWII, fragmentation became a dominant visual and cultural motif. For African American artists like Bearden, this wasn’t a stylistic choice—it was a lived reality. The legacies of slavery, segregation, and urban dislocation had literally and figuratively torn communities apart.

Bearden’s collage philosophy wasn’t just about putting pieces back together. It was about showing that the pieces themselves mattered—that beauty and truth resided in the scraps, in the in-betweens, in the imperfect joins.

Train Whistle Blues (1964) exemplifies this aesthetic. A monochrome photostat collage, the piece captures Black figures in transit—physically, emotionally, historically. The train itself becomes a recurring Bearden motif, symbolizing both escape and exile, migration and loss. These trains carried families North during the Great Migration, and they echo with the moan of the blues.

Through such works, Bearden transforms fragmentation into form. His collages are not about restoration to a pre-broken state. They’re about transformation—about building something wholly new from what has been scattered.

Collage as Political Resistance

A moment of transformation, steeped in ritual, reverence, and radiant joy.

Bearden’s art was quietly but profoundly political. Without slogans or posters, he offered visual resistance to dominant narratives that excluded or distorted Black life. By placing Black subjects in domestic, mythological, and spiritual contexts, he re-centered the African American experience within the canon of Western art history.

His use of collage itself was radical. It signaled that Black identity, like the medium, is constructed, layered, and constantly evolving. He refused to present his subjects as static stereotypes or idealized icons. They are composite beings—resilient, layered, complicated, and whole.

In Baptism (1964), the central figure is not rendered in one tone or texture but assembled from fragments—each one speaking to ancestral memory, bodily presence, and spiritual awakening. Bearden’s theology of collage places faith in form: the act of making becomes a sacred ritual in itself.

A Legacy Continued: Collage Today as a Tool of Truth

Bearden takes us backstage to the glamour, grit, and grace of Black performance.

Bearden’s visual philosophy lives on. Contemporary artists like Mickalene Thomas, Lorna Simpson, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, and Tschabalala Self continue to use collage—sometimes literally, sometimes conceptually—to explore intersections of race, gender, beauty, and power.

Mickalene Thomas’s rhinestone-encrusted portraits echo Bearden’s celebration of Black interior life, but with a feminist twist. Lorna Simpson’s photographic collages interrogate identity through fragmentation, placing Black women at the center of conceptual narratives. Njideka Akunyili Crosby weaves Nigerian family photos, advertisements, and patterns into layered portraits that challenge Western views of the diaspora.

All of these artists extend Bearden’s assertion: that collage can serve as a radical methodology, a way to visually resist erasure, and to rebuild cultural continuity out of disruption.

Try It Yourself: Collage as Personal and Political Practice

You don’t need a studio to begin thinking like Bearden. Start with what you have—a pile of magazines, some scissors, a glue stick, and a kitchen table. Think about the people, places, and rituals that define your story. What fragments might you piece together?

• Cut out textures that remind you of home.
• Layer images that show contradiction—urban and rural, past and present.
• Don’t aim for realism. Aim for truth.

Better yet, join a Bearden-inspired workshop or webinar, where artists and educators explore the power of collage as a form of personal storytelling and collective resistance. These programs, offered by institutions like the Romare Bearden Foundation, invite participants of all levels to create, reflect, and share.

Reimagining the World—One Piece at a Time

A regal tribute to the great Bessie Smith — voice of power, pain, and joy.

Romare Bearden didn’t just collage pictures. He collaged realities. He took the cut-up, overlooked, and castoff and gave it shape, dignity, and resonance. His visual philosophy teaches us that history isn’t linear and identity isn’t fixed. What matters is the act of assembly—the careful and creative reconstruction of a world we want to live in.

Today, in a society still shaped by fragmentation—racial, political, generational—collage offers a way forward. It invites us to gather the broken pieces and imagine what comes next.

The world, according to Bearden, is ready to be remade.