Robert G. O’Meally is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has served on the faculty for thirty years. The author of The Craft of Ralph Ellison, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, The Jazz Singers, and Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey, Robert’s new books are The Romare Bearden Reader (edited for Duke University Press, 2019) and Antagonistic Cooperation: Collage, Jazz, and American Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2020).

The Romare Bearden Reader (Duke, 2019)  gathers the most significant interviews and occasional writings by this major African-American painter beside essays by leading poets, novelists, and art historians. Highlights of the volume include new essays by Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, Farah Jasmine Griffin and Brent Edwards as well as classic analyses of Bearden’s art by Elizabeth Alexander, August Wilson, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and Richard Powell. What’s new here is the intense focus on the capacity of Bearden’s art to influence other artists, visual and literary, and to help all of us see one another and our planet differently. Rich with global references and yet signed with his own style, Bearden’s art proclaims that we are all collages, as individuals and as communities. We are one and yet multiple. As such, not only are we fragmented, we are stitched together; not only are we torn and broken, we are richly layered with possibilities for mending and–to use a word frequently used by the artist–for redemption.

Photo by Terrance Jennings.

This event will be followed by a book sale and signing, with books provided by The Red Wheelbarrow Bookstore.