A Life in Collage portrays American artist Romare Bearden (1911–1988) through interviews with people close to him—artists, museum curators, writers—and Bearden himself. He emerges as an artist who made the lived experience of African Americans visible, drawing on memories of North Carolina, New York, and Pittsburgh to create a collective memory.
By alternating between conversations and Bearden’s work from various periods, the film shows how the introduction of collage into the artist’s practice marked his breakthrough in the 1960s. This technique enabled him to incorporate social and contemporary themes into his work, with great resonance. The film also explores the influence of music, particularly jazz, both in the club scene and in his approach to composition. His motto for life, “You have to take what you find,” also applied to his use of found imagery. After the Second World War, Bearden encountered artists such as Picasso and Matisse in Europe. His achievement, one curator notes, was to merge the mainstream and the blackstream in his art.
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