If you're in Washington

I recommend that you check out the National Gallery's exhibition of Romare Bearden (1911-88), an influential African-American artist. I stumbled into it the other week and was captivated. Bearden was a product of the Harlem Renaissance, and there are a lot of jazz resonances in his work, both explicitly (see here, here, and here) and implicitly (I'll leave a discussion of call-and-response themes in his work for smarter folks, but believe me when I say there's something there), which I love. He also constructed monumental collage and assemblage scenes, many of city streets, that are evocative and powerful (see, e.g., here). The Gallery's exhibiton is excellent, and well worth seeing.
- posted by Anonymous @ 9:21 PM