Black-on-Black Art: Romare Bearden and My Invisible Father

My father often remarked that as a black visual artist he was likely to remain bereft of the spoils of his labor during his lifetime. “I’ll die penniless,” he liked to say, his eyes widening with feigned mirth, his eyebrows raised high, as if his own words surprised him. “And then, once I’m dead and gone, they’ll raise me up, and say, oh! Have you seen his work? Pure genius!”

It was an old story: The visionary who can’t even afford a ham sandwich. I’d heard it so many times it was like the first splash of tepid raindrops in the tropics, steel and chrome rising forty stories high in midtown Manhattan, puffy white clouds of breath on a snow-capped mountaintop—remarkable only to newcomers. I adored my father’s art: his expansive watercolors, luminous collages, oil paintings that shimmered like deep pools of color. His bas-reliefs combined the stately elegance of a Roman or Grecian bust with the nubile beauty of the African female form, and his Transparent Collages were pure magic—the stained glass-like medium floating like iridescent rainbows in our windows, casting prisms of colored light that danced across the walls. Surely we were the only family in our housing project who played out the daily drama of life before an audience of art-characters more colorful than us.

I was once on a Brooklyn-bound 3 train when a forty-ish maroon-skinned man with oval spectacles and a wheat-colored corduroy ensemble asked me where in the world I had found the book I was holding in my lap. I say “holding” because it was my father’s book, and you don’t carry it so much as hold it—at almost eight pounds, it has the same heft as a newborn. I was twenty-five at the time, and in the mid-nineties, a gently-used edition of The Art of Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of Ritual could price anywhere between five hundred and a thousand dollars, depending on its condition. If it was signed by Romy (pronounced Row-me) who’d passed in 1988, it was worth even more, and a careless scratch to the white dust jacket or glossy white cardstock pages might reduce its value. That day on the train, I remember holding the book on my lap face-up, my hands splayed flat across the geometric Bearden collage-faces that I’ve known since birth—a host of creatures as endearing in my eyes as the Sesame Street gang. But like Big Bird’s Snuffleuffigus, Bearden’s images often seemed invisible to others.

It’s not just Bearden’s work, or my father’s—I’ve long marveled at how art in general can be so easily overlooked, yet a wide-screen television or a newly-acquired smartphone will inevitably provoke a lengthy discussion about quality and price. Even today, I am surprised anew each time people visit my home for the first time and fail to so much as glance at the many objects of art that live with me—paintings, collages, sculptures, masks, and all the rest. Those who do notice often say things that indicate their experience with (or without) art. For instance, “I love your decorations” implies that art occupies the same place in their minds as a nice rocking chair or a lovely set of curtains.

This blinding lack of awareness about art might be why at first I thought the corduroy-clad fellow on the train was using my father’s book as an opening for a more intimate exchange. He wasn’t, which placed him firmly in the two percentile of men who have ever approached me during an inner-city mass transit excursion. His attention was divided between two planes of activity—searching the cover of Dad’s book like a man who just spied something he’d heard about but never seen (maybe a unicorn or a white phoenix) and giving me quick, slant-eyed glances that revealed his skepticism.

“Your father,” he said, “wrote that...