Romare Bearden

Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1912, Romare Bearden settled with his family in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in 1915. His father worked as an inspector for the city sanitation department and his mother was a prominent Harlem figure: chairman of her school board, national treasurer for the Council of Negro Women, and community activist.

As a young boy, Bearden made occasional trips to visit his grandparents in the South and his maternal grandmother in Pittsburgh, where he spent his fourth-grade year of school in 1920 and finished his last two years of high school, from 1927 to 1929. It was in the neighborhood in which his grandmother lived that he met his childhood friend Eugene, whom Bearden credited with teaching him to draw.

Bearden attended New York University and studied mathematics, but art continued to interest him and he began to paint in 1935. At the Art Students League in New York he studied with the German artist George Grosz, who encouraged him to incorporate social and political commentary in his art. Between 1935 and 1937 Bearden earned money as a professional artist by drawing political cartoons for the Baltimore Afro-American.