With Jacqueline Francis
Wednesday, June 25, 2025 at 11 am PT / 2 pm ET / 20h CEST

Romare Bearden, Young Students, c. 1964. Collage of various papers on board, 15 1/2 x 24 inches (39.4 x 61 cm). Private Collection, California © Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
The forthcoming inaugural installment of the Romare Bearden catalogue raisonné project will cover the years 1964 to 1969, a period of enormous import and transition in Bearden’s career. In the collages and in their enlarged, photocopied versions, he interpreted a wide range of subjects that had intrigued him as a younger artist: ancient and modernist literature, motifs of Western art history such as The Madonna and the female nude, and enigmatic genre scenes of everyday people, here presented as iconic types—teachers, preachers, musicians, laborers, healers, and card players. West African ritual sculpture–a body of work that Bearden had studied in exhibitions and researched since the 1930s—was a new compositional element in the Sixties’ collages. In this presentation, Jacqueline Francis will discuss Bearden’s methods and stated objectives. This decontextualizing tactic lent enchantment, energy, and majesty to these amalgamated pictures, constituting a narrative of the Black diaspora, and the prodigious impact of African American culture as a historical phenomenon with great impact on every aspect of American life.

Jacqueline Francis is an art historian, curator, and educator. She is Dean of the Humanities & Sciences Division and Professor in the History of Art and Visual Cultural Studies at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. She is author and co-editor of several books among them Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? (2023), Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America (2012), and Romare Bearden: American Modernism (2011) .She was the co-curator of the Huntington Art Museum’s exhibition “Sargent Claude Johnson” (2024) and a co-editor of the accompanying catalog. She also has curated two exhibitions (2022, 2024) of abstract artist Adia Millett’s work for Hong Kong’s Galerie DuMonde. Among her other curatorial projects are the group shows “Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life” (2023, Museum of Craft & Design San Francisco), and “side by side/in the world” (2019, San Francisco Arts Commission Main Gallery).