Village of Yo, ca. 1964
Collage, 9 x 12 1/4 in. (22.9 x 31.1 cm)
Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., B.A. 1913, Fund
2000.28.1
Art © Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Already an accomplished abstract artist, Romare Bearden was propelled by the Civil Rights movement of the early 1960s in the United States to a return to figuration. In 1963 he began using collage as a way to reintroduce the political possibilities of figurative images into his abstract vocabulary. In Village of Yo, a work that reveals Bearden's social and political concerns of the 1960s, he alludes to the dual role of European and African heritages that form the basis of the African-American experience. At the center of the composition, a cubist-inspired head peers from a post-and-lintel frame, drawing on the dual perspective of profile and frontal viewpoint common to Egyptian images. Bearden then repeats this motif throughout the collage in numerous surrounding heads constructed out of photographs of African masks, ritual sculptures, and contemporary faces. The relays among these heads exemplify Bearden's literal and symbolic reframing of the vocabulary that European modernism appropriated from Africa, within the cultural context of his own African heritage.
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