NEW YORK, NY.- Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is presenting Romare Bearden & Nancy Grossman: Collage in Dialogue, an exhibition focused on the artistic exchange between two leading innovators of the medium. Though Bearden was a generation older than Grossman, the artists initiated their collage practices within a year of each other—Grossman in 1962 and Bearden in 1963—and shared crucial developments in their technique through a continuous dialogue. Brought together through the cultural milieu fostered by their dealer at the time, Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery, the two artists remained close friends until Bearden's death, forging a vital rapport that shaped their practices and lives.

The works presented in Romare Bearden & Nancy Grossman: Collage in Dialogue reveal surprising alignments between the artists’ collage oeuvres despite divergent subject matter and stylistic approaches. Both artists repurposed excerpts from previous artworks into material for new collages and applied various pigments (ink, acrylic, watercolor) to elements of many works in order to energize the composition. Where Bearden’s collages explore memory and autobiography within larger cultural narratives, Grossman’s collages are deeply psychological explorations of the human condition expressed via an open-ended material experimentation.

Bearden and Grossman’s works were shown together in group exhibitions at Cordier & Ekstrom as well as institutional venues beginning in the late 1960s, around the time that their friendship blossomed. This trend continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s, most notably in the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) exhibition Collages: Selections from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden organized by Howard Fox, which toured the country from 1978–82. The two artists nurtured their friendship through regular studio visits, enthusiastic support of each other’s exhibitions, and numerous events related to their shared social circles. Grossman recalls long conversations with Bearden about art, food, and life unfolding during their studio visits, and she cherished the correspondence she received from him.

A particularly formative exchange between the two artists occurred shortly after 1967, when Bearden began sharing a studio with Jack Schindler, a commercial designer. Bearden had been experimenting with various supports for his new body of collage works, and Schindler suggested he use Masonite to mitigate the warping that occurred as the adhesive dried. Grossman had encountered a similar issue with her own collages around this time, and Bearden had consulted conservators at The Metropolitan Museum of Art regarding various treatments to stabilize their images. The solution arrived one day in the form of a rain-spotted note taped to Grossman’s mailbox: in Bearden’s hand, it read, “Glue paper to the back.” Sure enough, after adhering papers to the verso in equal weight to the materials on the front, both sides of the Masonite shrunk in sync and the surface remained flat.

Years later, Grossman honored Bearden and his technical revelation through the incorporation of his note into her complexly layered, large-scale collage Exploding Tongues - Untied Scape (1993), which features prominently in Collage in Dialogue. Both Grossman and Bearden maintained a vast cache of found and collected paper materials that held deeply personal significance to them, and Grossman’s retention of Bearden’s note over twenty-six years is emblematic of the artists’ accumulative tendencies. Exploding Tongues - Untied Scape is titled after experimental filmmaker Marlon Riggs’ landmark video essay dedicated to Black gay love, Tongues Untied (1989)—an apt tribute given the repeated presence of labels from sardine tins that were gifted to Grossman from her partner, the art historian Arlene Raven, rendering the collage a poignant, recombinant expression of love and friendship.

Featuring thirty-five works dating from 1962 to 1993, Romare Bearden & Nancy Grossman: Collage in Dialogue constitutes a concise survey of the collage oeuvres of both artists. Major examples from Bearden’s Of the Blues series, a group of collages referencing specific narratives from the history of blues and jazz, will be featured alongside portrayals of Black culture in the locations that had the greatest impact on his life, namely New York City, Pittsburgh, and North Carolina. The Grossman collages on view fall roughly into two categories: abstracted landscapes and renditions of the figure. The latter comprise featureless, masculine forms posed in positions of restraint, and directly relate to her iconic leatherbound head sculptures, as she repurposed the patterns used to cut the leather into collage media. Grossman’s “landscapes” typically take the form of horizontally oriented, allover compositions with varying levels of formal density and often bear references to her personal life in the form of old maps, tickets, letters, and photos. A fractured quality runs throughout both artists’ collage oeuvres; seams, tears, and disjointed scales between elements are emphasized, rather than ameliorated, transmuting the dissonance of lived existence into a new, harmonious whole.

Where the structures of Bearden’s collages are informed by his deep, comprehensive knowledge of Western art history—especially the Old Masters and traditional African material culture—Grossman’s compositions are direct descendants of modernism, often evoking abstract expressionist landscapes or surrealist renditions of the figure. Notably, both artists began their careers as painters and evolved into multimedia practices in pursuit of a truer vision of their lived experience. Indeed, the formal relationship between their work was perhaps best summarized by the artist Nayland Blake in the catalogue for Grossman’s 2012 career retrospective, when he wrote that Bearden’s collages create “poems of the black body and urban space. Grossman’s collages start from a similar place but veer off in the direction of a planar mosaic. While Bearden appeals to our urge to reconfigure the fragmented space into narrative… [Grossman’s] collages are not windows to be seen through, even when she presents imagery of a landscape; we are meant to see the land itself as skin, creased and permeable.”[3]

Augmenting the artworks on view in Romare Bearden & Nancy Grossman: Collage in Dialogue will be a vitrine dedicated to archival materials featuring correspondence, exhibition ephemera, and personal photos as well as an illustrated map charting the locales Bearden and Grossman frequented throughout the decades, providing illuminating context to these artists’ enduring friendship.


[1] Nancy Grossman, artist statement for It’s Only a Paper Moon: The Universe as Collage, Shirley Fiterman Gallery, Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, August 16 – September 28, 1994.
[2] Romare Bearden, “Rectangular Structure in My Montage Paintings,” Leonardo 2 (January 1969), 17-18.
[3] Nayland Blake, “Misrecognized,” in Ian Berry, ed. Nancy Grossman: Touch Life Diary, exh. cat. (Saratoga Springs, NY: The Francis Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, 2012), 106