Speaker 1 (00:00):
Coming up on Art Palace, 

Speaker 2 (00:02):
Rury's grandmother thought, oh, this is great. He's got a friend and he's learning how to draw until she saw what they were drawing, and then she took all their artwork and burned it. 

Speaker 1 (00:26):
Welcome to Art Palace, produced by Cincinnati Art Museum. This is your host, Russell iig. Here at the Art Palace, we meet cool people and then talk to them about art. Today's cool person is museum docent, Julie Willis, who is taking me on a walkthrough of something over something else. Romero Bearden's profile series. I thought it was funny how much you protested being on here. You would be like, so you're like, I don't think you know how shy. 

Speaker 2 (01:06):
Well, absolutely. Anyone who knows me would say that, 

Speaker 1 (01:10):
But I think that's funny. So why did you want to stand up in front of strangers and talk about 

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Art? Isn't that weird? I know. It's like, well, when you have passion for something, you have power, I think. And as long as I know what I'm talking about, I'm okay. But you know what? People have a BS meter and I realize that. And so when I don't know what I'm talking about, I feel really uncomfortable. And so I 

Speaker 1 (01:42):
Bet you have a good BSS meter and I think you vastly overestimate other people BS meter. 

Speaker 2 (01:50):
I dunno. 

Speaker 1 (01:50):
I think my experience, people don't have very good BSS meters. I feel like people listen to a lot of it and go, oh yeah. And just sort of nod along. 

Speaker 2 (01:58):
Yeah. Well, I worked with students for a long time and that's when I started gaining power, I think, or confidence I should say. 

Speaker 1 (02:07):
Right. You say you started working with students? What do you mean? 

Speaker 2 (02:10):
I taught at the collegiate level. I taught graphic design. Oh, okay. 

Speaker 1 (02:15):
So this seems like a really good fit for you 

Speaker 2 (02:17):
Then. Yeah, I was really excited about this exhibition. As soon as I heard about it, I had to be involved in this. 

Speaker 1 (02:22):
I think you would agree that there's a relationship there, and I guess it's just like they seem so fundamentally rooted in that some of those same principles of basic graphic design principles, I 

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Guess. Well, yes, the principles and elements of design are on display, full display here. 

Speaker 1 (02:40):
Yeah, so I think that's maybe where I was thinking. And even it hearkens back to pre-computer graphic design too, of cutting things out 

Speaker 2 (02:48):
With 

Speaker 1 (02:50):
Exacto knives 

Speaker 2 (02:50):
And stuff like that. Yes. It's very physical. 

Speaker 1 (02:53):
So we should go ahead and say where we are we in the exhibition called something over something else? Rome Bearden's profile series. And you know what I just said? Romero Bearden. And because that's how I grew up saying it. I've heard this name, but I guess we've learned now, now I guess pronounced Re Is that 

Speaker 2 (03:11):
Right? Romey. 

Speaker 1 (03:12):
Romey. Okay. So I take everything Isaiah is going to be wrong. 

Speaker 2 (03:15):
Well, I wasn't sure I was going to even bring this up because everybody says Romero, but he himself introduces himself as Rome, like Rome, the city Romey. You can hear him introduce himself in one of the videos, so we know that. But even his wife said Romero. 

Speaker 1 (03:37):
Yeah, that's what I had heard. I think we should all just cut ourselves a little bit of slack on names. It's like they're names. People say them differently. It's fine. 

Speaker 2 (03:46):
Let's just call him Bearden. 

Speaker 1 (03:48):
It's the same thing. Or 

Speaker 2 (03:50):
Romey. Romey is what his friend called him. Cute. 

Speaker 1 (03:53):
I love that. That's Roy. We'll get with Roy. Anyway, there's a picture of Romi working in his studio, and that kind of is the beginning. I should also say I am experiencing this show for the very first time as we stand 

Speaker 2 (04:09):
Here. I love it. 

Speaker 1 (04:10):
So you've had a little bit of a leg up on me. You've actually gotten to walk around, so I'll let you sort of lead me because I don't actually know what's coming up. 

Speaker 2 (04:20):
Well, that photograph's a good place to start because it shows Bearden in his studio and right behind him you see a photograph of his grandparents who lived in Charlotte, North Carolina. He had another set of grandparents that lived in Pittsburgh, and these were highly influential people in his lives. So he kept that photograph of his grandparents there in his studio with him. So shall I just tell you a little bit about the exhibition, what's going on here? Yeah, 

Speaker 1 (04:52):
Sure. If you want to give us a little overview of it, that'd be great. Just 

Speaker 2 (04:54):
A quick overview. It's broken up into two parts profile series that were done in 1978 and 1981. 1978 was his memories and impressions of his time in Charlotte, in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, and also in Pittsburgh. So that section is part one exhibited in 1978, and then in 1981 there was another exhibition of his memories from Harlem. He moved as a child from Charlotte where he was born. He moved with his parents to New York City and often came back to Pittsburgh and to the Charlotte area, Mecklenburg to visit with his grandparents. So that's where all of these memories are coming from. 

Speaker 1 (05:54):
Okay, awesome. Well, let's look at some stuff. 

Speaker 2 (05:57):
So we're stopping in front of Mardel Sleets Magic Garden, and I should mention that the titles were written by Beard and himself in partnership with a friend of his who's a writer named Albert Murray. And also on the gallery walls, you see captions that he and Murray wrote together 

Speaker 1 (06:20):
And the captions we were just talking about. There was a lecture the other night, they were showing images of how in the original exhibitions, Bearden had sort of scrawled these himself in his own handwriting on the gallery wall. So they're kind of printed in a similar size about how he would've written them, but they're just typed out here, but they're sort of positioned on the gallery wall in the same places. 

Speaker 2 (06:49):
Then the captions themselves, since they were written by beard, and they are part of the artwork, and sometimes they do relate directly to the artwork, but sometimes you read it and you look at the art and you kind of scratch your head and you have to figure out where the connection is there. This particular one does go right with the caption, goes with the image, 

Speaker 1 (07:17):
Yeah. We see this sort of woman who sort of feels like she's maybe kind of crouched down. It's a little hard to see in the image because of the way it's kind of collaged together, but she's sort of surrounded by flowers and there's a cabin in the background. So yeah, I mean the idea of somebody's garden is pretty clear here. 

Speaker 2 (07:40):
I think I forgot to mention to everyone that these are collages. 

Speaker 1 (07:45):
Yeah, that's sort of what he's most famous for all these collages. So yeah, if you're not familiar with Bearden's work, he started out painting, but then this is sort of what I think I sort of had heard of him was about these collages. That's where I became familiar 

Speaker 2 (08:03):
With, yes, in the sixties, he's sort of, his career was relaunched by some collage work that he did and just took off from there. So these are pieces of paper, magazines, fabrics, and some papers that he made him himself. You can see where he's in some places he's painted some paper and then cut the paper up and reassembled it. So that's where this title of the exhibition comes from, something over something else, because Bearden expressed his thought of art making as putting something over something else, which is very appropriate to the idea of memories as well, because we're dealing with memories here as we go through our lives. Memories get layered upon layer. 

Speaker 1 (08:59):
This one, it's really easy to see all of the kind of painting work he's also doing here. This one arm we can see in the foreground that's kind of the closest to us is it appears to be originally a black and white image of an arm. And then it looks like he sort of stained it with watercolor or some kind of very transparent paint to give it a skin tone. Actually, I'm thinking maybe all of her face might also be black and white image originally, and then he's kind of staining it with a flush tone. 

Speaker 2 (09:33):
It's interesting how her arm actually becomes part of the flowers there. So the caption says, I can still smell the flowers she used to give us and still taste the blackberries. So he's reminiscing about a woman that lived in his town in Charlotte who was kind to the children, and when they'd walk by, she'd give them flowers and blackberries, 

Speaker 1 (10:01):
If you took away that caption, it's like Del Sleets magic Garden. It says one thing, and then when you read that caption, it makes it very personal. All of a sudden it puts him in the story. And it's interesting too, it adds this other element of something that's not in the image, the idea of blackberries or fruit and things. So it's, I like the idea that it incorporates taste something that you don't really see in the actual image. 

Speaker 2 (10:31):
And the painting right next door is also Mod del Slee, so we can look at her in a much larger scale. The Sleets Magic Garden is a small work. It's only about eight by 10. Now, this one is a lot larger. This one's called Sunset and Moonrise with mod sleet. 

Speaker 1 (10:51):
The scale of this one is really impressive because you think of collage as being a little bit smaller often probably just because of the sort of source material you have to work with. Okay. If you're trying to cut images out of magazines or things, then your largest images can be only about that big. So it might be a little harder to work on a larger scale sometimes, but 

Speaker 2 (11:13):
Yeah. Well, he recognized that in this first part of the exhibition, the works are smaller, and he said that they were small like this, because when you're a little child, everything looks so different than it does when you grow up. 

Speaker 1 (11:32):
And 

Speaker 2 (11:33):
The spaces seem larger to you when you're a child, and then you go back and you revisit it and it's all very small. 

Speaker 1 (11:41):
So 

Speaker 2 (11:42):
That was his idea, I think, on this. 

Speaker 1 (11:45):
And actually just now looking at it too, I'm realizing you had mentioned that he used fabrics 

Speaker 2 (11:51):
A lot. 

Speaker 1 (11:51):
And this is one that where again, it makes sense for the scale of the piece because he can get fabric comes in large bolts and you can buy large pieces of fabric. So the biggest piece of probably any single source I can see here is that her skirt, her 

Speaker 2 (12:07):
Skirt. So this is a large portrait of Del Sleet. She's standing there, it looks like a cabbage patch, a vegetable garden, and she's got a little basket back there that's full of what she's just harvested. There's some bushes in the background and some hills, and you'll see her house back there. And the caption says when her husband died, she worked the farm most of the time by herself. Now, Russell, what do you think about those hands? 

Speaker 1 (12:37):
I know there's several pieces that I've seen in the catalog, at least I have seen all these images in the catalog before, but there's these giant, giant hands, and I've seen other pieces where he uses that, but it seems to emphasize the labor or this is the part of her that's doing the most work. This is the most important part of her are her hands, is kind of what I get from it. 

Speaker 2 (13:05):
And I think about in our African gallery, how exaggerated they made the parts that were important in the African sculpture, the big eyes or the big ears or the big head. And I think that maybe he was emphasizing the hands because of the manual work that she was doing. 

Speaker 1 (13:31):
Yeah, I mean, I know in the other one, which is that I'm thinking of that I've looked at a lot because of the August Wilson project we have coming up, the mills hand lunch bucket 

Speaker 2 (13:42):
Is 

Speaker 1 (13:42):
Another one where the man has giant hands. 

Speaker 2 (13:44):
We'll be seen that one in a few minutes. And 

Speaker 1 (13:46):
Again, it's like somebody who's working, it's sort of like a person who probably works with their hands, so it makes sense that he's sort of pushing that side of things. 

Speaker 2 (13:55):
Yeah. 

Speaker 1 (13:57):
This one's great though. I feel like it has a lot of those sort of little painterly touches as well, where even if he's cutting out things, they've sort of been painted on before or after to give them a lot more texture. So there's these really lovely sort of watercolor stains and things on our hands. 

Speaker 2 (14:17):
Oh, the texture and the color in this exhibition are just so delightful. I, I was in here on Saturday morning and this was the first time the public 

Speaker 1 (14:29):
Really 

Speaker 2 (14:30):
Got to see, it was a few days ago, and there were kids in here and everybody was loving it. 

Speaker 1 (14:37):
I think I like this one so much also because there's a lot of contrast between say that relatively calm flat sky, and then the ground when you move down, it gets so much vibrant and busy. So I like that sort of area of rest. The moon has a little bit of texture behind it, but then everything else in the sky is very flat. It 

Speaker 2 (15:02):
Gives us some contrast. Yeah, 

Speaker 1 (15:04):
Exactly. 

Speaker 2 (15:04):
I love the way that he has cut the fabric, the stripes on her skirt so that you can see where it's moving. 

Speaker 1 (15:13):
Yeah, yeah. He's got these, even the way it's glued down, it looks like he's sort of pushed the fabric around a little bit to give little waves 

Speaker 2 (15:22):
Where her leg would be. Yeah. Yeah. 

Speaker 1 (15:25):
It's really smart. And now that you're saying that it looks like he's sort of gone in with a little bit of paint to give some shadowy areas to sort of help define the body. Yeah. 

Speaker 2 (15:36):
Well, let's look at this other one over here, which is really a highlight. 

Speaker 1 (15:39):
It's another pretty large scale one. 

Speaker 2 (15:41):
Yeah. 

Speaker 1 (15:42):
This looks, I've only seen this one in pictures, and it is way more impressive in person. 

Speaker 2 (15:47):
What do you notice about it that's different than in the pictures? 

Speaker 1 (15:50):
Again, you don't get all of that sense of all of the textures and 

Speaker 2 (15:54):
Details 

Speaker 1 (15:54):
That when it's reproduced at probably a 16th of its size is what I'm used to seeing it. And so you don't get the sense of how much texture, how much it sticks off the surface. Like this quilt, these different pieces of fabric really register as different pieces of fabric, and you can see how the different textures that they have, literally not saying that in the sort of designy sense of the word. I mean literally if you rubbed your hand across it, which you should would feel, all of these different feelings that each one of these types of fabrics has. 

Speaker 2 (16:33):
Well, for the listeners, this is Ms. Mammie Singleton's quilt, and it's a large work, and we're inside what looks like it's probably a log cabin due to the texture on the walls, and it is just a riot of color and texture. Wouldn't you agree on this? 

Speaker 1 (16:54):
But although I like that, again, the colorful part is really the most colorful part is that quilt. And then you have these sort of really cool muted blues that are elsewhere in the piece, and then the logs, which are fairly colorless or very neutral, so it makes that quilt extra vibrant, 

Speaker 2 (17:14):
Extra emphasized. Yeah. The caption says she was famous for her quilts. This is a very short caption. So there's a woman on the floor in front of a, looks like a wash tub, and she's got a picture right next to her as if she were bathing, getting ready to bathe. We're viewing her from the back. I don't think she's unclothed. No, she's not unclothed. She's got something on, 

Speaker 1 (17:42):
Well see. Looks, see, I'm thinking she's nude, but with a towel 

Speaker 2 (17:47):
Kind 

Speaker 1 (17:47):
Over her shoulder. That's how I read it. 

Speaker 2 (17:51):
And there's a wood-fired stove on the right hand side. A lot of little accoutrements that you would find in a home, a clock of things on the shelf, you'll find a picture on the wall. So it's homey. 

Speaker 1 (18:09):
I like that he's made this calendar. It's this sort of hand-drawn calendar. It is kind of great that it feels like, oh, I couldn't find an image 

Speaker 2 (18:20):
Of a calendar 

Speaker 1 (18:21):
That I wanted, so I'll just make one. 

Speaker 2 (18:23):
And I think he must have made the log cabin textures there. 

Speaker 1 (18:29):
It 

Speaker 2 (18:29):
Looks like painted paper that he cut up into strips, and part of it is vertical and part of it is horizontal, so there's all kinds of activity going on there. 

Speaker 1 (18:40):
It's really effective though. I mean, the illusion is pretty convincing if you see it. It really does read as if you were looking at this in a book. That's one of the differences is you might read that as printed wood that he had cut out. And I think in person you can tell, oh no, that's like hand painted. 

Speaker 2 (19:01):
You 

Speaker 1 (19:01):
Can see the differences. 

Speaker 2 (19:03):
This was a surprise for me to see too. I had studied in the book like You did, and for me to see it, I see all the blues that are in those grays up there 

Speaker 1 (19:15):
In 

Speaker 2 (19:15):
The cabin. 

Speaker 1 (19:16):
Yeah. Yeah. Those subtleties just don't really relying on immaculate printing to sort of translate certain those really subtle colors. 

Speaker 2 (19:28):
But the idea of a quilt also pertains to the idea of a collage, because you are improvising. 

Speaker 1 (19:36):
And 

Speaker 2 (19:36):
This is a theme I think that is kind of pervasive, this theme of improvisation, because when you're making a collage, you're improvising, and when you're making a quilt, you're using scraps of fabrics that you have. So these memories that he's got in this exhibition are scraps and snippets from his life. 

Speaker 1 (19:59):
Yeah. I'm just noticing one of my favorite little weird details about this piece are the window sills 

Speaker 2 (20:05):
Where 

Speaker 1 (20:05):
There's this green border that goes around some of the window, but not all of it. And it sort of makes you realize like, oh, this has probably been falling into disrepair. And then parts have been, it makes you think the house has been put together in a similar way of a collage also like, oh, this piece fell off. So we had to replace it with something else is how it reads to me. 

Speaker 2 (20:31):
It could be. It also gives it some depth. It shows kind of where the light would be hitting it. And you notice the circles here? 

Speaker 1 (20:40):
Yeah. 

Speaker 2 (20:40):
There's the moon out the window. If you go through the exhibition, you'll find suns and moons in a lot of places. So we see the round moon, we see a round plate, we see the round clock, we see, I don't know what this is on the wall, but something round, I 

Speaker 1 (20:58):
Think it's a mirror. 

Speaker 2 (20:59):
Yeah, a mirror I guess. And there's a pan on the wall. It looks like there maybe a cast iron pan. So those circles kind of lead you through this composition. 

Speaker 1 (21:10):
Your 

Speaker 2 (21:10):
Eye connects those circles. Another thing about the way that he worked is he would start by placing just rectangles on his board, and then he would get the balance and the rhythm of that just in rectangular form. And then he would start placing figures and objects and things on top of those rectangles. So there's an underlying structure to all of these, which lends its some unity. 

Speaker 1 (21:40):
Yeah, that's nice. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. It's a good way to work of just sort of feeling confident in the basic bones of it, the sort of skeleton and then sort of filling that in. Yeah. 

Speaker 2 (21:51):
Yes. Well, I think this is a real highlight, but let's go look at the one that's in our collection. Oh, 

Speaker 1 (21:57):
Yeah, yeah. That's the one I mentioned earlier. 

Speaker 2 (22:00):
So there's a great big timeline on the wall here. It takes up the whole wall, which talks about his biography and also things that were going on in the United States at the time. I don't know. We mentioned, well, yes, we did mention that he was born in Charlotte. He's a American. Everything about this exhibition is American. It's totally American. 

Speaker 1 (22:24):
I like the way that this is a weird thing to be excited about, but I feel like timelines are so boring to me actually in exhibitions. I'm so boring. 

Speaker 2 (22:33):
You do like 'em or you don't like em? 

Speaker 1 (22:35):
Don't usually. I'm not that interested in reading them. And this, I actually am kind of the thing I like about it is that the way his actual life events are raised and are a little more pronounced, so they're on these sort of raised panels and then white on a sort of dark gray. And then these other important events in American history is sort of surrounding 

Speaker 2 (23:05):
Them. Well, it's meaningful on the, 

Speaker 1 (23:07):
Yeah. 

Speaker 2 (23:08):
Yeah. It's meaningful in his life because he was born in 1911 in the south. This was the time when the so-called Great migration. African-Americans were moving up to the cities, New York City, Detroit, and Pittsburgh and so on, which was exactly what his family did. And then he arrived in Harlem at the time of the Harlem Renaissance, and as we'll see in the next section, that had a huge influence on his artwork. 

Speaker 1 (23:41):
Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting parallels to see how even founds Bluebird music company with Dave Ellis and engages in songwriting, and then he tried a few years later in 1959, Motown Records is founded. I mean, this was kind of nice to sort of see those two things in relationship to each other. And even 1970 rap and hip hop originate in the Bronx. I think there's a relationship to the idea of rap and hip hop with a lot of this work because it's built on sampling. So you're taking these other source materials and remixing them and making them into your own thing. So I think there's a really similar working method. Again, that idea of improvisation, of taking what you've got and working with it. There's something there too. So these sort of important moments in black history that are sort of surrounding his life, and you can kind of think about how they do or do not perhaps play off of each other. 

Speaker 2 (24:43):
Yeah. Alright. Well, Han's lunch bucket is in our collection. 

Speaker 1 (24:48):
Yeah, 

Speaker 2 (24:48):
That's this piece here. Is this the first time you've seen this in person? 

Speaker 1 (24:52):
It is the first time. I've never seen it on display before, and I'm guessing, I'm just going to guess here. I don't know this for sure, but because these works are collage, I'm guessing that they're fairly light sensitive. 

Speaker 2 (25:05):
So 

Speaker 1 (25:06):
Things like this just don't get to be on display a lot. It's like our Dega drawings. We would love to have them out all the time, but because they're on paper, they're just very sensitive. 

Speaker 2 (25:16):
So that's another thing that makes this exhibition so special is that these pieces all belong to individual collectors and museums. And the high museum in Atlanta obtained one of the large pieces that we'll get to in a few minutes, and they had the idea to go around, do the legwork, and try to collect all of these pieces from track them down. So there are 30 collages here out of 47 that were in the two shows. 

Speaker 1 (25:50):
Yeah, it's a big undertaking when you think about having to pull and trying to create this very complete image of these two moments. And it's not easy to get everybody on 

Speaker 2 (26:02):
Board 

Speaker 1 (26:02):
To coordinate all those loans. 

Speaker 2 (26:04):
So they were shown in Atlanta, now they're shown here in Cincinnati, and then they go back to their owners. And 

Speaker 1 (26:11):
Probably in the museum cases, they go back into storage for a long time because they've been on view for so long. So they have to probably be in the dark, is my guess. Yeah. I have not seen this piece in person. I've looked at it a lot recently just kind of in prep for some programs. So this is probably more the scale I would've expected it to be 

Speaker 2 (26:31):
A lot of the collages. 

Speaker 1 (26:32):
Yeah. Yeah. It seems more kind of modest. 

Speaker 2 (26:35):
Oh, I just noticed something. The flooring on this piece is the same as Mod Dell Sleets stockings. 

Speaker 1 (26:41):
Yeah. I knew I recognized texture, but I didn't remember from where, but you're right. How about that. 

Speaker 2 (26:47):
Yeah, he's pulling from his scraps that he's got in his studio. 

Speaker 1 (26:50):
Yeah, that's interesting. And I've never noticed this sort of little, it's almost like a little baby here on the floor. 

Speaker 2 (26:58):
Kind of strange on the floor, huh? 

Speaker 1 (26:59):
Yeah. 

Speaker 2 (26:59):
Well, to describe it, we're looking at an interior of the boarding house that Bearden's grandparents owned in Pittsburgh. It was a boarding house where a lot of the workers who worked in the steel mills would live really grueling hard work, and his grandmother would feed them, provide their meals and their boarding. So we're seeing a meal hand coming down the stairs on the left hand side, he's got a huge hand and he's reaching for his lunch bucket that's on the table 

Speaker 1 (27:37):
There. 

Speaker 2 (27:38):
And in the middle there is a table with two people seated. One man is kind of looking down and there's a woman standing there. There's other kuman chair, a pictures on the wall, and then a window, which you'll see in a lot of these collages. It's an interior with a window to the dangerous outside world. So there's sort of the contrast between the comfort of home, the safety of home, and the dangerous outside world. So we're seeing Pittsburgh out there with the orange sky. 

Speaker 1 (28:20):
Yeah, it feels like pointy and hot. 

Speaker 2 (28:23):
Yes. So we're seeing smoke and there's all this, there's a train, which is another motif 

Speaker 1 (28:30):
That's 

Speaker 2 (28:30):
Used a lot, and you notice the orange light that's coming into the room from the window. 

Speaker 1 (28:38):
I hadn't picked up on that, but yeah, that makes sense now that you see that kind of orange colored sky, and then you can see that sort of diagonal that's cutting across her body really. And that's sort of, yeah, I noticed that shape, but I hadn't really put it together as being light from outside. And you can see it kind of on the floor too. I think you can sort of see places where the light is sort of hitting the floor as well with that sort of 

Speaker 2 (29:04):
Orange color underneath the chair. 

Speaker 1 (29:06):
Yeah, interesting. 

Speaker 2 (29:07):
So you see that structure there. He's left some of those rectangles showing he was influenced by Mondrian and also by the Dutch masters like Vermeer 

Speaker 1 (29:20):
Because 

Speaker 2 (29:20):
They did a lot of interiors, and he realized that that's what he was actually doing was sort of Vermeer like things. 

Speaker 1 (29:27):
Yeah, that's an interesting 

Speaker 2 (29:29):
Compositionally. Anyway, 

Speaker 1 (29:30):
Yeah, a lot of those Vermeer pieces are very sort of straightforward and very sort of static in some ways. 

Speaker 2 (29:40):
We're on a stage here, which is interesting because this piece influenced August Wilson to write Joe Wilson. 

Speaker 1 (29:50):
Joe Turner's come and Gone. 

Speaker 2 (29:51):
Come and gone. Joe Turner's come and gone. Yes, yes, yes. 

Speaker 1 (29:55):
I know this because I'm working with the Playhouse right now. Playhouse 

Speaker 2 (29:59):
In the park, and 

Speaker 1 (30:00):
They're going to do a stage reading of it here coming up. And so we're putting on a full blown production is a lot of work and money. So what we're doing is we'll have actually a lot of different, I think every single part has a different actor, and 

Speaker 2 (30:21):
Wow, we're really going all out on it. 

Speaker 1 (30:23):
So it's going to be pretty big, but ultimately you're going to get to hear these talented people sort of read it in a way that is, hopefully you can sort of experience the story of it. 

Speaker 2 (30:35):
Yeah. Well, I haven't seen the play myself, but as I understand it's about the working class man and how they're sort of taken advantage of, or I don't dunno if that's the right word. 

Speaker 3 (30:51):
And 

Speaker 1 (30:52):
I have not read the whole thing, so I did kind of skimm through it and read a bit of it before we started the project. But yeah, it takes place in a setting very, very similar to this. And it also is sort of about the sort of cast of characters who come in and out of this boarding house. 

Speaker 2 (31:12):
Yes. 

Speaker 1 (31:13):
It's like a nice setting in that way where it makes sense for strangers rarely drop in and out of a normal person's home, but it kind of makes sense for it to be this more public and private place. You have these different characters that people, the residents and then sort of the neighbors and different people like that. So yeah, it's a surprisingly big cast of characters. I want to say there's about 11 roles in it. Wow, 

Speaker 2 (31:40):
Really? 

Speaker 1 (31:40):
Yeah. 

Speaker 2 (31:41):
And it's just one basic set though, isn't it? 

Speaker 1 (31:44):
Yeah, I believe so. I think it all takes place in that same room. And like I said, we don't have to build a set since we're just doing a reading, so that's the nice thing. 

Speaker 2 (31:55):
Well, we get to look at the picture because it was based, the concept was based on this painting. 

Speaker 1 (32:00):
And one of the things I had heard or had read that the original production really kind of used this painting as the staging almost. 

Speaker 2 (32:12):
They 

Speaker 1 (32:12):
Basically like, well, it let's build the set like this almost. 

Speaker 2 (32:16):
Yeah. Well, I can see that for sure. The caption says the mills went 24 hours a day with three eight hour shifts, so he's really emphasizing the workers there. At one point in his, I think he was a teenager, he admired these working men and he lived among them during his high school years with his grandparents, two years in high school. And at one point he did work in the mills and found out really how hot and dangerous difficult the work is. Well, it's a really special piece, and there's a piece right next to it here that I love the caption on it, and we can compare these two because it says, I used to look at the sky and think of storybook dragons, and it's got this orange sky. It's a really similar kind of 

Speaker 1 (33:11):
Setting 

Speaker 2 (33:11):
Here. 

Speaker 1 (33:12):
It's called Pittsburgh memories, Allegheny Morning Sky, and yeah, they have that same orange color. Yeah, that's when I kind of said, it looks hot and pointy toy's. What I said the other way in here. I think that makes sense too, where he says it makes him think of dragons, bringing in that idea of heat 

Speaker 2 (33:31):
And 

Speaker 1 (33:31):
Fire 

Speaker 2 (33:32):
And something. I love that idea because little boys, this storybook dragons, it makes you think of a child. 

Speaker 1 (33:40):
But again, I think this one even maybe more so than that last one where the interior feels maybe just a little more chaotic. This one really does have that sense of interior as safe and comfortable, and then the outside is being a little bit more dangerous. 

Speaker 2 (33:55):
Dangerous, yeah. Well, you notice the rectangles here. As I'm standing here, I'm seeing, we saw the circles that were leading us through the composition that we were looking at earlier. Now I'm seeing a lot of rectangles 

Speaker 1 (34:09):
And another calendar on the wall. We were talking about the other one where he had drawn it. Here. He has a little printed calendar, and then there are a lot more rectangles in this one that sort of mimic the shapes of 

Speaker 2 (34:21):
Framed pictures and then something on the upper right there that, I don't know what, oh, it's another window and we're looking outside. Okay. 

Speaker 1 (34:32):
I had not read that as a window either. Interesting. Maybe the sky is so different looking or on that side. 

Speaker 2 (34:39):
And then we are looking into another space here. You see the smaller people there. We're looking deep into the house. Yeah, I'm seeing a lunch bucket on the table. It looks like the same kind of lunch bucket that the man is grabbing for over there. 

Speaker 1 (34:53):
Yeah. It's interesting the way those shapes, the circles and that piece and the rectangles in this one, they kind of make me the piece very musical in a way to me. 

Speaker 2 (35:05):
Oh yes, 

Speaker 1 (35:07):
The 

Speaker 2 (35:07):
Rhythmic, that kind of repetition 

Speaker 1 (35:09):
Of the shapes, and it gives it a sort of playful musicality to me. And especially when you kind of think about the rectangles of the window and that doorway are also these sort bigger examples. And then those are sort of little accents. 

Speaker 2 (35:26):
Yeah. Well, it's interesting you say that because we will be heading into Harlem in a few minutes, but you will see a lot of musical 

Speaker 1 (35:37):
References 

Speaker 2 (35:38):
There. We want to stop here, I think at Farewell Eugene now talk about a lot of activity going on. Yeah. Have you heard the story of Eugene? 

Speaker 1 (35:49):
I have not. And I know they referenced it the other night in the lecture, but I don't know if I picked up on anything more than just, I remember them talking about them changing the title, but I don't know anything 

Speaker 2 (36:00):
Else about 

Speaker 1 (36:00):
Eugene. 

Speaker 2 (36:01):
Yeah. Well, Eugene was a childhood friend of young Romey in Pittsburgh, and Eugene was, he had ill health, so he couldn't go to school a lot. He couldn't go outside. So he spent a lot of his time indoors, and he lived on the third floor of a brothel. His mother was a prostitute, and he drew what he saw through the floorboards. He was looking through the floorboards and he was making drawings of the things that he saw going on in the brothel. And young romey asked Eugene to teach him how to draw. So that's what they were doing. They were looking through the floorboards and making these drawings. And Andy's mother or grandmother thought, oh, this is great. He's got a friend and he's learning how to draw until she saw what they were drawing. And then she took all their artwork and burned it and grabbed Eugene by the hand and marched him back home and insisted to his mother that she come live with them. 

Speaker 1 (37:12):
Oh, wow. 

Speaker 2 (37:13):
That 

Speaker 1 (37:14):
Eugene. 

Speaker 2 (37:15):
Eugene, come live with them. Eugene, come live with them. So Eugene also had some pet pigeons that you see here in this painting. So anyway, 

Speaker 1 (37:25):
Yeah, the birds that were one of the first things I noticed there. 

Speaker 2 (37:29):
So Eugene ended up passing away soon after that. Unfortunately, he had really poor health, and so this is farewell Eugene. It's depicting his funeral. And Bearden did promise that he would release the pigeons when he died. So we're seeing the pigeons flying off. 

Speaker 1 (37:53):
The way he captures the grief in the crowd is so amazing. And it's maybe less literal sort of use of space in some of his works. And he's being more sort of expressive in this sort of dream-like sense of this giant head in the 

Speaker 2 (38:14):
Middle of it. The scale is all over the place. 

Speaker 1 (38:16):
Yeah. Yeah. It's not as literal, but I love the way that it becomes, that grief is magnified in that way. The emotions of the people become so exaggerated, but that's sort of what it feels like. So 

Speaker 2 (38:31):
That's moving. You see them all looking different directions now. You notice a division there. 

Speaker 1 (38:38):
Yeah, right. There's this tree right down the middle. On the left side is where you have this sort of really crazy explosion. And then on the right side, the figures are much more, like I was saying, sort of grounded in the realities of space, I guess it feels like in scale. 

Speaker 2 (38:55):
And the tones are different too. They're more muted. 

Speaker 1 (38:57):
Yeah. Yeah, definitely 

Speaker 2 (38:58):
Not as colorful. There's the orange moon up there. So yeah, the caption says the sporting people were allowed to come, but they had to stand on the far right. So the sporting people are the people that are associated with the brothel. So those people on that side, beyond this vertical division are the sporting people. 

Speaker 1 (39:23):
The sporting people. 

Speaker 2 (39:25):
Yeah. 

Speaker 1 (39:26):
I don't even know what that means, where that comes from. That's so funny. 

Speaker 2 (39:32):
Yeah, there is another collage and we passed by it, but it also refers to the sporting people. 

Speaker 1 (39:38):
Interesting. 

Speaker 2 (39:39):
So prostitution was just kind of a fact of life. It wasn't hidden from these young boys. It was just a way of making a living for them. So they played, there's a band back there on the far upper. They would play funeral music, but then after the funeral was open, they would break out into ragtime more joyful kind of music. And the birds are what beard and called journeying things. Birds and trains are some motifs that you see a lot in the works trains, obviously, because they brought the people north from the south and set you going on a journey. And the birds of course, too. 

Speaker 1 (40:33):
Yeah. Yeah. This piece is great. 

Speaker 2 (40:36):
So we're heading now into the next section here. This is Harlem. So these were displayed in 1981. Let's start with this one over 

Speaker 1 (40:48):
Here. Sure. Yeah. This one feels so different than the rest. 

Speaker 2 (40:50):
It does. The style changes a lot here. You'll see. Well, 

Speaker 1 (40:54):
This one feels the most just straight up painted. It feels. So the figures are mostly just painted, and the collage elements are almost these sort of abstractions. Again, when you mentioned Mondrian, that's the first thing I think of when I look at those tape strips and things. They feel like something from a distill artwork. 

Speaker 2 (41:18):
So what we're looking at here is called Rehearsal Hall Made in 1981, and it's depicting some jazz musicians. It's really colorful, a lot going on. 

Speaker 1 (41:30):
The only sort of more traditional kind of collage element. The sheet music at the bottom that is pictures of sheet music, but everything else is very painted, the hands. There's some photographs it looks like 

Speaker 2 (41:44):
Of some of the hands, and there's a microphone up there coming up from the top. Oh, yeah, I 

Speaker 1 (41:47):
Totally missed that. So there are some of those collage elements, but overall, I feel like he's really painting the bodies way more than we see in the works. We've certainly looked at so far. 

Speaker 2 (41:58):
And he did call his collages paintings. He referred to them as paintings. The sheep music is a little small to read, but it says Rummy Young who was a trombonist. And then the sheet music is, it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. And the other one is solitude. So Bearden was surrounded by all these jazz greats. His mother was very well connected in society and had people like Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes, all these people were dropping by famous artists and writers. So yeah, we're looking here at uptown Manhattan Skyline Storm approaching a large piece. So we're on the rooftop, and so many times we've been seeing views of interiors with a view out a window to a dangerous world. Now we're outside on a rooftop and it's being framed by other buildings, and we're looking out toward the city storm coming. But the colors aren't very foreboding, are there? They're not dangerous. 

Speaker 1 (43:07):
No, no. It actually, I mean, you have these little, the lines coming through. The clouds are one of my favorite parts of this. I guess light, it's hard to tell what it's meant to represent, or rain, I don't know. 

Speaker 2 (43:24):
Look at the wind is blowing the close on the line there. 

Speaker 1 (43:28):
That part is really effective. Well, that combined with the way the direction she's holding that umbrella sort of tells us so much. You can kind of tell, oh, the wind is coming. So maybe that's just the wind that's kind of coming through. The clouds also sort of following the same direction. 

Speaker 2 (43:48):
When a storm is coming, you get that wind beforehand. So that's coming up. 

Speaker 1 (43:55):
I love the way the buildings have this subtle gradation from one color to another, from one side. So then as these just big blocky shapes, it gives so much dimension to have those different gradations across the buildings. 

Speaker 2 (44:12):
And those aren't photographs, those, it looks like paper that he has painted and cut out to create those shapes. 

Speaker 1 (44:21):
This one seems to have very few photographs that I can see. I mean, there's the fabric that we talked about. The bodies seem to be mostly made up of either just sort of cut shapes. There seems to be some, one of the woman's hair has some clear writing in it, 

Speaker 2 (44:39):
So it was like, oh, it's like her bunt. Yeah. Yeah. 

Speaker 1 (44:42):
So it's like that was cut from some sort of image, but he's just looking for the solid image of black, 

Speaker 2 (44:50):
Like a silhouette. 

Speaker 1 (44:51):
Yeah. So it's like he's cutting out things for magazines, but he's looking less for the images in this piece and more just for the solid colors. The woman's blouse is fabric. 

Speaker 2 (45:01):
I think probably 

Speaker 1 (45:02):
That print. 

Speaker 2 (45:03):
Oh yeah, the seated woman. 

Speaker 1 (45:05):
Yeah, I can see her. Yeah, it's made of fabric. I can 

Speaker 2 (45:09):
See it now. It has a pattern on it. Yeah. 

Speaker 1 (45:11):
And then this lunch or the picnic basket is also, it looks almost like a photograph at first, but it's also just made up of painted strips. And then you 

Speaker 2 (45:20):
Have Oh, it sure is. 

Speaker 1 (45:21):
Yeah, you, the fabric in it is made up of photographs, just like the cloths that are kind of hanging up, that are blowing on the line. But yeah, it's overall, it's like almost everything is sort of just hand-drawn or hand 

Speaker 2 (45:35):
Hand cut. Hand hand. You see how he's using bleach now to get those spots? 

Speaker 1 (45:41):
That's what he does, 

Speaker 2 (45:42):
Yeah. Oh, cool. And you see in the sky, he's done that. Now, this is also, I point out to you, to the listeners, there's a woman seated and there's a woman standing behind her, and the woman standing behind her is holding an umbrella that's protecting the seated woman. This is that motif of guardianship that we see throughout the exhibition in places where, especially in maybe the places where there's a suggestion of prostitution, an older woman protecting a younger woman, or one person protecting another person. This idea of safety. There's a few pieces that have mother and child in them. That idea of protection. 

Speaker 1 (46:32):
I 

Speaker 2 (46:32):
Love this. I love this piece. I love the composition. I can just be there. The colors are happy. There's a rhythm going on with the way that the buildings are stair-step kind of. 

Speaker 1 (46:47):
Yeah. And it's full of this. That sort of turquoise is sort of a really dominant color in it that comes in, and the buildings and the sky and this pink. So doesn't have that threatening feeling you might expect from the title. It's mostly, it's that kind of turquoise and pink that comes through. 

Speaker 2 (47:07):
And the floor looks really similar to what we saw in the quilt painting with the same technique, this really painterly texture painted and then cut up and put into strips. 

Speaker 1 (47:21):
Yeah. Yeah. Alright. So you wanted to look 

Speaker 2 (47:23):
At, this is our 

Speaker 1 (47:24):
Last one. 

Speaker 2 (47:25):
Yeah. 

Speaker 1 (47:26):
This is also way bigger than I expected it to be. 

Speaker 2 (47:29):
I was surprised at the scale on this one too. 

Speaker 1 (47:32):
This is probably the largest piece in the 

Speaker 2 (47:35):
Exhibition. So this one's called Artist with Painting and Model. And this is really the only place, well, there's one other place, but you can really see him as a self-portrait here. And the other pieces, he is present in the other pieces, but he doesn't depict himself because when you think about your own memories, you don't see yourself. You see what you see. So I think that that's what he was doing in the rest of the works here. But in this one, he's actually presenting his own physical image, and he's standing next to a painting. It's a reworking of a painting that he did in 1941. It's placed on an easel, and the painting is of Mary and Elizabeth, 

Speaker 2 (48:29):
The biblical story. But it's been placed in the south, as you can see, a cabin in the back there. And the colors are really bright. He's brightened the colors in this painting as compared to the original because at this time he was living in the Caribbean. He had a home with his wife in the Caribbean, St. Martin. And so he was influenced by how colorful it was in St. Martin. This was done in 1981. He was in his late, well, mid sixties when he did it, 67. So here's this man in his sixties looking back 50 years to memories and remembering things through that filter. And now here we are in 2020, looking at it, 40 years since then. So we're looking back a lot of years, and there's different timeframes that we're seeing here. This actually couldn't have really happened exactly this way because this is supposed to have taken place in the thirties, but the painting wasn't made until 1941. But just like our memories, they get a little confused as far as when things actually happened. 

Speaker 1 (49:56):
And 

Speaker 2 (49:56):
It becomes a composite. Your life is a composite, 

Speaker 1 (50:00):
And we were talking about this earlier. There's this sort of cloth or something that's sort of draped over the chair. And if you look, you can see clearly that his hand, one of his hands is cut out from that same piece of paper that's making up that shape. And so one of the things I think is so interesting about that is why did he choose to make that one hand? Gray 

Speaker 2 (50:26):
Isn't strange. I don't know. It just has me 

Speaker 1 (50:31):
Puzzled. He made his head in his other hand, this sort of yellow color, and then that one hand is gray, 

Speaker 2 (50:39):
And it's still in the same style. You can see the details are in sized in it, just like his other hand and his face. And it's like a claw almost, or a calip. And he's grabbing, I don't know if that's Mary or Elizabeth, probably Mary. What's he doing? 

Speaker 1 (50:58):
Yeah, it is a weird gesture. I mean, think from my guess, I think he's just trying to have his hand resting over top of the canvas. And 

Speaker 2 (51:07):
It's 

Speaker 1 (51:07):
Maybe not the most, I don't know, convincing way a person would hold their hand in that way. But it does, the way the fingers are positioned, it almost looks like you're saying A, 

Speaker 2 (51:18):
It's 

Speaker 1 (51:18):
Like squeezing the head of the person in the painting. It kind of looks like where he is about to. But yeah, I mean, from the pose, I almost feel like he's just trying to pose with the painting is 

Speaker 2 (51:31):
What it feels like. Yeah, he is. He's presenting himself. This is his model over here. And she's cut out like a Matisse. He actually did meet Matisse. 

Speaker 1 (51:42):
Oh, really? 

Speaker 2 (51:42):
Yeah. He went to the Sorbonne on the GI Bill. So he studied a philosophy there, I believe, for a few months. And while he was in Paris, he also traveled to Italy. So he got to see a lot of the sites. And he did meet some of the big artists that were working at this time. 

Speaker 1 (52:04):
I mean, yeah, this one is, there's a lot of Matisse influence in a lot of his pieces. But this one, I feel like you can really feel it. The sort of cloth that's draped around the model's waist, the way that that texture is painted, 

Speaker 2 (52:18):
And 

Speaker 1 (52:19):
Even the cutting of shapes and stuff. The shapes he makes feel very matis inspired. 

Speaker 2 (52:24):
So he's showing us his influences. There's his African heritage and the models cloth. Also, you'll see in his sketchbook that we see on the floor, there's a Benin sculpture, which was the representation of a really strong woman. Strong women were something that were a part of his life. His grandmothers, both of them, and his mother and his wife were all very strong women. So you'll also see behind him, there's a little part of the mata altarpiece to kind of give a nod to his art history background. 

Speaker 1 (53:07):
Yeah. I love, and I love the masking tape that's holding it up on the 

Speaker 2 (53:12):
Wall, just like you would actually see, 

Speaker 1 (53:15):
Of course, just really masking tape that's taped to the surface. But it's a really fun trick because it doesn't read as masking tape stuck to the surface of this picture does. It 

Speaker 2 (53:28):
Doesn't, yeah. 

Speaker 1 (53:29):
It totally goes to the background and functions 

Speaker 2 (53:33):
Just like it would be real. Yeah. 

Speaker 1 (53:35):
Yeah. I mean, it's a fun trick. And then I noticed here too, he has a really fun signature in a lot of these pieces. And I like this one too. It looks like you signed it on another piece of paper and then just glued it to the surface. It stuck 

Speaker 2 (53:47):
It on there. 

Speaker 1 (53:49):
And it's not super discreet either. It's pretty out there in the middle almost. 

Speaker 2 (53:54):
I like his signature. It kind of goes kind of vertical in some of the paintings. 

Speaker 1 (53:59):
He breaks up the letters and a lot of them where it'll say he'll have the R and the O and the M, and then the A, the R and the E will be in the next line, and then he'll break up almost into bare den, I've noticed. Yeah. 

Speaker 2 (54:15):
Yeah. I love the paintbrushes up there in the corner. They're just so fun to look at in the cup that they're in. And I see the use of foil. Yeah, 

Speaker 1 (54:26):
The foil. Yeah. That's great. And I was looking at trying to see what the images that's making up the brushes. There's definitely a texture there that he's using. It's a photo of something and I can't quite see what it is. It's fun. It's not actually brushes, it's like something else, but it's like standing in and it does the job. 

Speaker 2 (54:47):
Something that has vertical lines in it 

Speaker 1 (54:49):
That 

Speaker 2 (54:50):
Could be a paintbrush. 

Speaker 1 (54:51):
Yeah. And it has a soft, you can kind of tell the picture is some sort of soft surface, like a fabric or something, and it conveys the right texture. 

Speaker 2 (55:03):
Yeah. I think little surprises like that are what makes it fun, I think is just delightful. And like Robert O'Malley said in the lecture the other night, look again, come back and just keep looking. 

Speaker 1 (55:18):
Yeah. This show, I mean, we just looked at a few pieces in this whole big exhibition, and I feel like you could really spend a long time, if you really wanted to dig into any one of these works, you could just sit and stare at it forever because there are so many details that are buried in there. 

Speaker 2 (55:35):
Yeah. Well, I have a quote from Bearden. Can I read it? Sure, sure. Alright. Bearden was talking to a younger artist and advising the younger artist. He said, become a blues singer. Only you sing on the canvas, you improvise, you find the rhythm and catch it good and structure as you go along. Then the song is you. 

Speaker 1 (56:02):
That's great. 

Speaker 2 (56:02):
So I think it is fun to go through this exhibition and pick out the painting where the song is you. 

Speaker 1 (56:08):
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for being our guest 

Speaker 2 (56:10):
Day. Julie. Julie, my pleasure. It was really fun. 

Speaker 1 (56:12):
Yeah. Thank you for listening to Art Palace. We hope you'll be to come visit the Cincinnati Art Museum and have conversations about the art yourself. General admission to the museum is always free, and we also offer free parking. The special exhibitions on view right now are something over something else. Romero Bearden's Profile series, and Women Breaking Boundaries. I mentioned in the episode the staged reading of Joe Turner's Come And Gone by August Wilson. That will be happening on April 16th at 7:00 PM Admission is $10 for members and $20 for the general public. For program reservations and more information, visit cincinnati art museum.org. You can follow the museum on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and also join our Art Palace Facebook group. Our theme song is Ferran Musico by Blau. And as always, please rate and review us to help other people find the show. I'm Russell Iig, and this has been Art Palace produced by the Cincinnati Art Museum.