Bearden as Collagist
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In 1963, Bearden attended a meeting of the "Spiral" group which was a gathering of many African-American artists, writers and composers who were searching for ways that they could contribute to the Civil Rights Movement. Around this time, Bearden began putting together small photomontages. At the suggestion of one of the "Spiral" members, Bearden began to enlarge some of his photomontages. One day, a New York Art Dealer named Arne Eckstrom noticed them and wanted to include some of them in an exhibition.
The exhibition was called "Projections" and it took place in two parts. The first part was in October of '64 and it simply displayed the original small photomontages along with the enlarged version. A year later, the second part of "Projections," displayed in Washington, D.C., would include more themes and the maturation of his photomontages into collage. The themes that Bearden explored in "Projections"--which consequently became his most predominant ones until the end of his career--included African and African-American seasonal rituals, night ceremonies and the overall nature of contemporary Black life.
More specifically, Bearden's subjects in his paintings were closely linked to his experiences and places of residency while growing up. His subjects would include blues guitarists, jazz musicians, mother and child, family, two women in a landscape or interior room, cat, "conjure woman," and "journeying things" such as birds and trains. In many of his paintings, like Watching the Good Trains Go By and Prevalence of Ritual: Baptism , the trains symbolize, for Bearden, the other (White) civilization and its encroachment into the Black neighborhood, since many Black neighborhoods were located near the railroad where he grew up in the South. The Conjur Woman represents the Black female herbalist/conjurer (usually found in the rural South and urban North) who possesses the spiritual powers of Africa and the unseen forces to heal or destroy (Campbell and Patton 39-40).
Bearden's collage paintings also marked his return to figurative painting (using people figures in his works). His artistic influences at this time were African sculpture and Chinese Calligraphy.
Many art critics oversimplified his use of collage as being simply faces cut out of magazines and placed on canvas, but Bearden explains "...my method is more complex...in creating a picture, I use many disparate elements to form either a figure, or part of a background. I build my faces...from parts of African masks, animal eyes, marbles, mossy vegetation, etc. Then I have my small original works enlarged so the mosaic-like joinings will not be so apparent...I have found when some detail, such as a hand or eye, is taken out of its original context and is fractured and integrated into a different space and form configuration, it acquires a plastic quality it did not have in the photograph," (Campbell and Patton 44-45).
For the remainder of the '60s, Bearden continued to combine the techniques he previously learned into his collage paintings. He painted his largest figurative paintings during this time, displaying life-size subjects in iconic poses that were highly suggestive of great ancient Egyptian or Greek figures. Due to their scale, these figures would carry "a sense of myth, their mundanity disappearing in the magnificence of Bearden's style," (Campbell and Patton 45). Examples of this occur most notably in Melon Season and Rites of Spring.
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