About this Event
Join us for a conversation with Robert G. O’Meally to celebrate his new book, a series of ingenious oil paintings and collages created by consummate jazz painter Romare Bearden, exploring themes of Black American culture, jazz music, and the relationship between urban spaces and visual art. He will be in conversation with Frank Stewart, followed by a signing.
PLEASE NOTE: RSVPs are encouraged but not required. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served. Doors open at 5:30 pm.
Can't attend? (please specify that you would like it signed in the comments box at checkout).
The first publication to focus on a rarely seen series of jazz-infused collages that explore the African American experience and the artist’s lifelong relationship to jazz music, by one of the most important and influential visual artists of the twentieth century.
Bearden (1911–1988) was a prominent African American artist often described as the consummate jazz painter, known for his innovative collages that explored themes of Black American culture, history, and personal experiences. This publication reexamines Bearden’s life and work in the context of jazz, tracing the musician’s impact from the artists’ earliest oil paintings to his iconic collages.
In 1981, Bearden created nineteen collages that the artist called his “Paris Blues,” or simply “Jazz,” series. Conceived as pages for an oversized book that would be a response to the Hollywood movie Paris Blues (1961)—though featuring Harlem and New Orleans along with Paris—the series has been little known until now. Here the wildly colorful illustrations are set alongside Bearden’s encounters with iconic jazz musicians, clubs, and cities. Examined for the first time in depth, the Paris Blues series makes a major statement on the relationships between visual art, jazz music, and urban spaces. The book also includes poignant photographs of Bearden and musicians in the 1950s–70s, such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.
Robert G. O’Meally is Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, where he has taught for 40 years. He is the founder of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies and the co-director of Jazz Generations Initiative, a national program supporting jazz across the disciplines, across generations. His books include Antagonistic Cooperation: Jazz, Collage, Fiction, and the Shaping of African American Culture; The Craft of Ralph Ellison; The Romare Bearden Reader, ed.; Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey; Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday; The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. He is co-editor of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature and Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies. His Smithsonian box-set, The Jazz Singers, was nominated for a Grammy. O’Meally has curated exhibitions for the Smithsonian Institution, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. His new books are Romare Bearden: Paris Blues: Painting Jazz and A Very Short Introduction to Jazz Music (Oxford, forthcoming 2027).
Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Frank Stewart grew up in Memphis and Chicago. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was a student of Garry Winogrand and received a BFA in photography from The Cooper Union in New York, where he studied with Roy DeCarava. Stewart became the assistant and photographer to the artist Romare Bearden after the two met in 1975 while filming the documentary Two Centuries of Black American Art, a project organized by David C. Driskell. Stewart has had numerous solo and group exhibitions, including at the International Center of Photography in New York, MOCA in Los Angeles, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.He has twice been granted a photographic fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a New York Creative Artist Public Service Award. He is a member of Kamoinge, an African-American photography collective based in New York. For three decades, he photographed the renowned performers for Jazz at Lincoln Center. In 2023, the retrospective Frank Stewart’s Nexus: An American Photographer's Journey, 1960s to the Present originated at The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C, and travelled to Artis–Naples, The Baker Museum, Naples, FL; and Telfair Museums, Savannah, GA. The exhibition was accompanied by a monograph published by Rizzoli.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Rizzoli Bookstore, 1133 Broadway, New York, United States
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