Friends of famed Harlem artist Romare Bearden want him to get a room – at the Museum of Modern Art
Longtime Bearden friend Russell Goings, the first board chairman of Harlem’s Studio Museum, wants MOMA to create a permanent display of Bearden’s works
- Russell Goings, (r.) a friend and collaborator of famed Harlem artist Romare Bearden, discusses Bearden’s work with students from PS 57 in East Harlem
Romare Bearden is one of, if not the greatest, American visual artist of the 20th Century and should be celebrated as such.
That’s the message Russell Goings and several literary and academic powerhouses delivered to an enthusiastic crowd at the 92nd Street Y this week, asking the packed house to help secure a “Bearden Room” in the Metropolitan Museum of Art or other prominent facility where the late artist’s works can remain on permanent display.
“If Bearden is the quintessential artist of the 21st Century, then he should — and I am calling for this — he should have a room in the Museum of Modern Art,” Goings said to applause. “He should be afforded the same kind of grandeur and reception in the world, since he has the National Medal of the Arts.
“But if you go to the major museums and ask, ‘What do you have of Bearden’s’ they might have one piece, two pieces. But he is considered a national treasure. If he is a national treasure then he should have a room.”
Goings, 80, a longtime friend and cohort of Bearden’s, and his professor and writing coach, West Chester University of Pennsylvania Poetry Center Director Kim Bridgford, organized the program, “A Writers’ Celebration of Romare Bearden,” as part of the 92nd Street Y’s Literary Events series. The event was co-sponsored by The Romare Bearden Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Poetry Center.
Preceding them on stage to extol Bearden’s genius were Poet Elizabeth Alexander, Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch, author and curator Sarah Lewis, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Director Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and writers Kwame Dawes and John Edgar Wideman.
“Artists like Bearden see what ought to be, look at what is, and then, through their work, try to remove the contradiction,” said Lewis.
Alexander, a distant relative of Bearden’s, said the family pronounced his first name as “Ro Ma Ree” and that, when he was eight years old, Bearden gave Alexander’s then-eight- year-old mother a picture he drew of a crucifix.
“In Bearden you see black life presented in its own terms,” Dawes said.
Goings’ luminous career included a stint as a professional football player, opening the first black-owned companies to have a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and playing a pivotal role in founding both the Studio Museum of Harlem — he was its first Board Chairman — and Essence Magazine.
It was Goings’ long and intimate relationship with Bearden that resulted in the artist at his death in 1988 leaving Goings as caretaker of some 800 original Beardens.
“I was with him up to the very end,” Goings said. “I became the back that carried him up three or four flights of stairs, that put him in the tub, that rubbed him down. And I became the caretaker of a body of work from his first collage to his very last.”
Goings joked about walking through Harlem with Bearden, carrying a bag full of pictures of women Bearden intended to use in his signature collages.
“There we are, two black guys walking down the street with paper dolls,” Goings said. “I said ‘Man, suppose we get caught with this s—, how we gonna explain that you are a collagist and we have all these nude women in the bag?’
“He said you talk better than me, so you explain it.”
In earlier interviews Goings said he organized the event in part because he feels Bearden does not receive his due as the visionary he was.
“I perceive this as a watershed moment for Romare in many ways,” Goings said. “We’re hearing from people in the White House, from all kinds of private institutions inside and outside the country.
“We don’t have to make excuses about Bearden’s work,” he said. “He is on the highest level in the pantheon. That is to be honored, that is to be extolled.
“His body of work speaks for itself,” Goings said. “You can see his genius and his expression on the wall. We have his lines, his sense of balance, in his use of color.
“It is all there. It does not require any excuse. There should be in this country, in a major institution, a place for Bearden.”
Goings is the author of “The Children of Children Keep Coming: An Epic Griotsong.” The Romare Bearden Foundation webpage is www.beardenfoundation.org.