New Orleans: Ragging Home

New Orleans: Ragging Home is part of Romare Bearden’s collage series, Of the Blues. This series of collages (which the artist referred to as paintings) were inspired by the evolution of African American music, from the street bands of New Orleans to the jazz clubs of Harlem. This work depicts a Black jazz band walking on a street in the French Quarter in New Orleans after a funeral. It combines layers of acrylic paint, lacquer, graphite, and marker over cutouts of printed and painted papers.

You put down one color and it calls for an answer. You have to look at it like a melody.

Romare Bearden

Bearden was born in Charlotte and raised in New York City. As a young child, he and his family moved to Harlem during the Great Migration. Bearden grew up there during the Harlem Renaissance, when the neighborhood was becoming a prominent center for Black culture and visual and performing arts. Bearden was a founding member of the Harlem-based art group known as Spiral, which formed to discuss the responsibility of the African American artist in the civil rights movement.

You should always respect what you are and your culture because if your art is going to mean anything, that is where it comes from.

Romare Bearden

Bearden’s artistic style combines elements of cubism (different views of figures or objects placed together in the same picture) and abstract expressionism (gestural brushstrokes and mark making). He often used his own memories and experiences, African-American cultural history, and literature as sources for his subject matter. Many of his paintings explore themes relating to his Southern heritage, the civil rights movement, and music—especially blues and jazz. 

But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It’s based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience.

Romare Bearden

tags: movement, sound, order, place, ritual, community, celebration