by AVA TIYE KINSEY
What does it mean to collage? To piece together from something that was another thing a seemingly new entity entirely. What can be said about Romare Bearden’s hands and his kind and coy smile? The way his eyelids crease and fold over two, round soul-stirring bronzed portals. If the eyes are indeed the window to one’s soul, what can be said about what the soul sees when it peers out of those casements? Surely, Bearden’s answer was in the seeing and the conveying of present and past-life. Re-presenting Black life on a canvas or a tapestry from pieces—perhaps, discarded—refashioned and repurposed to tell a familiar story. Isn’t this what our ancestors did? They re-membered themselves in a stolen land, with only a few of their people. They met different people, but people who looked like them and they re-membered what they could remember to make an existence, a way of knowing anew.
What is collage in the hands—no, from the mind of Romare Bearden? It is an altar, a prayer, and praise. It is the distillation of who he was, who we are, and who we must vow to never forget. A collage is, as he called it, a projection[1], a moment held in time, yet happening simultaneously somewhere else, transposing and then reflecting itself in the here-and-now. And so, Bearden must be a high priest in order to conjure a feeling, to re-call, re-cite, to do a thing and in doing creating that which has been and will continue to be, making meaning through collage. Baptizing this other thing not originally fashioned by his own hands and finding eyes and ears and arms and mouth, and body and posture and energy and to make it a shrine to the ones before.
Romare Bearden, son of Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, began his artistic career in the 1930s as a painter and cartoonist. However, he is most known for his hybrid collages, which he referred to as projections, showcasing cultural retentions of West and Central Africa in the lives of Africans in the Americas. A long-time student of the works of African art, Bearden began his use of collage in the 1960s, almost thirty years into his artistic career. While living in Charlotte, Harlem, Pittsburgh[2], and later, Martinique, he drew most of his influence from the culture of African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans who lived in each space. Observations of his upbringing in North Carolina as well as the melding of African and African Diasporan cultures in Harlem, Pittsburgh, and the Caribbean would change the course of his perspective and inform African Americans of the blatant Africanisms— or “flashes of the spirit,” to borrow the title of African Art historian, Robert Farris Thompson’s seminal text—inherent in said cultures, though several generations removed from Africa. These “flashes” and “projections” of Black lived and recorded experiences illuminate how people of African descent retain and continue our traditions across time and space.
His 1964 collection The Prevalence of Ritual features myriad projections with themes that depict practices re-membered from a forcibly lost past in African American communities. Bearden was not only a student of African art for its aesthetic functions; he took interest in African art because of its practical and philosophical applications as well. It is for this reason that Bearden reproduces many of the images, themes, and subjects over time in his collage works. In this way, he underscores the importance of and an investment in a subject’s progression. He revisits the subject of his 1964 projection Conjur Woman in the 1971 and 1975 collages of the same name. Bearden has several other collages dawning the same title in other years, though those depict seemingly different subjects.
The conjurer is a revered person in her society. Being an elderly woman, she is the motherly consultant for those who need advice and aid. She has a power that only apprenticeship, time, and wisdom can render. Using an older woman as his subject, Bearden shows the significance of the female and the elder in African American societies. Bearden’s reuse of this woman is to redraft her, approach her as subject from a different light, and to show the various manifestations of the woman overtime. In the 1964 collage, she is drafted in a black and white motif. She is walking through the forest, perhaps collecting necessary objects to perform her crafts. In the 1971 image, shown on the following page, she is depicted in a black and white motif with hints of color in the back and foreground: the foliage, the snake in her hand, and her nose.
Perhaps it was not Bearden’s aim to initially recast this subject over time. There is a chance that it is mere coincidence that the first image of this woman in black and white who gets cast again and again was a mere desire, or event trope used by the artist in the face of lack of inspiration or needing to produce work to satisfy deadline or make money. I posit that the redrafting, the recasting of this figure is intentional on the artist’s behalf and equally on that of the subject. Our subject’s coming into existence is more than just a rendering an artist creates, as is the accepted function and use of an artist’s talent from a Western perspective. It is my belief that upon the conjure woman rendering, she becomes alive. Living. Breathing. As do all of Bearden’s pieces. He is not creating them. He is not re-presenting them. He is pulling from the store and source of Black folks, ancestors’ lived experiences, their dreams, their memories to distill an image, as a photograph might do. But still, in his collage, there is more because a photograph is just a captured moment in time.[3]
Bearden, artistic high priest, beckons the soul of this matriarch into a re-being. She has existed, she does exist, she will exist always because she must and who better than an artist, attuned to the ways of then and now, student of African traditions, to call her back from behind the veil. He draws out of his mind’s eye, the sovereign projector, a meditative representation of the spirit of the conjurer. It is from this spiritual knowing, after having studied, after having lived, after having seen his share of women much like the one depicted in these pieces that she comes forth again. These projections then become a living shrine to the ancestors who conjured at various moments in their lives. She is a projection casting her spirit upon his canvas moving from unalive to undead through his reinterpretation of her.
In the 1971 projection, Bearden depicts his subject in the same black and white motif so that the viewer can recognize her from the earlier collage; however, it is evident to the viewer that the subject is undergoing a change. She is surrounded by a more vibrant background and has, over time, learned how to hone her powers and commune with her environment. In the 1975 rendition of “Conjur Woman,” the last piece in which this particular conjurer makes an appearance, she is in the forest again. However, by 1975 both she and her surroundings are more vibrant and colorful.
This conveys that the subject has become fully actualized as a conjure woman. Both she and her environment have become one because time has allowed her to study and become engrained in her craft. The snake from the 1971 collage has moved from the palm of her hand. In the 1975 collage, it is wrapped around her arm. The new placement of the snake suggests that by 1975, it has become an aspect of nature with which she is familiar: her totem or animal guide. Each rendition of our subject moves from less to more color, also suggesting that our subject is bringing the practices of yore forward into the contemporary era. Consider the image of the conjurer in the 1975 projection to be the African elder of the 1964 and 1971 subject the elder in Africa. Consider, too, that her offspring, the 1964 an 1971 projections, who carry on her tradition lost their knowledge or ability to practice their traditions in the new environs they were forced to occupy. This, then, would mean that the older projections of our subject are, in fact, carry on the lineage of their mother (“Conjur Woman” 1975) in the Diaspora with lack of access to all of the resources their foremother had.
As with all forms of art, there are various interpretations to be derived from these collages. Each viewer’s interpretation of the Conjur Woman are all correct and those interpretations interact with one another simultaneously. A person merely viewing each of these pieces from an observatory point of view will see a woman, specifically a Black woman, that they may perceive as an elder in nature. A person of African descent may see their elder relative. They may regard the person as having a certain level of knowledge, and pulling on this thread, that viewer of African descent may remember stories about that person. Maybe they too were an elder regarded in the same manner as the subject. One steeped in the Black church legacy may see the elder mothers of the church in the subject and may also regard her as wise or a revered member of the community.
And still, a person initiated into an African spiritual system will see a woman traversing through a myriad of initiations to become the fully actualized priest or practitioner by the 1975 work. The latest collage shows the subject adorned with a necklace. In several West African, Caribbean, and African American-Southern spiritual traditions, initiates and practitioners of various traditions are given beaded necklaces, amulets, and other such adornments to protect them and/or to signal that they have undergone certain rites to render them credible in different spiritual and healing arts. Our Conjur Woman of 1975 is no different. The initiated viewer would also regard the animal totems (the snake and bird) as extension of the subject, not only guides, but beings that can inhabit the spirit of the conjurer and beings with whom she, too, can cohere energetically. They are her eyes, her protectors, her friends, and she is theirs. Because of this, this series of collages speaks to the universality of African spiritual traditions and the African worldview. Though our subject is in a different land, far from that of her ancestors, she is still able to access their knowledge. Because of her presence in the different place and through her training, the ancestors’ knowledge can be translated and made malleable in a new setting. This conjurer, like her counterparts and more recent ancestors in the Diaspora, found the North American cognates for her spiritual practices to keep them alive and thriving.
The three projections of the Conjur Woman in the depicted scene may leave one question in the mind of the viewer: “Why her?” The answer lies in the seeming misspelling of the word “Conjur.” Is Romare Bearden misspelling this word because not many African descendant people were literate and could spell? Is he playing upon the Southern dialectical omission of the ends of words? While these questions are valid and must be weighed, the answer to both is, “no.” The viewer must come to this work, these projections, understanding that the subject is authority, the one imbued with the responsibility and the respect of maintaining, sustaining, and furthering the knowledge of her ancestors and the land itself. In the Latin and the Greek, “jur” means “to swear” or “to take an oath,” as well as “law,” or “rule.” An archaic definition of the word “conjure” means, “to implore (someone) to do something.” And here lies the necessity in and needed omission of the “e” in “conjure.” The omission of the “e” also substantiates the earlier claim that our subject is both wise elder and initiated practitioner. Our Queen Mother has sworn and taken an oath to adhere to the laws of nature. She, implored by the rites of her tradition, and vicariously her ancestors, can protect and restore the balance of life in the Diaspora.
Harkening back to his ancestors’ West and Central African roots, Romare Bearden’s collages show that art not only imitates life, but that art is life. His projections’ subjects are always evolving, just as people are. Those subjects relay ideas about the growth processes of life. Each of Bearden’s works featuring this conjurer show Bearden’s ability to build on subjects and themes. His body of work reveals, and thereby legitimizes, the African practices present in the lives of African Americans. Through Conjur Woman (1964, 1971, and 1975), Bearden shows the viewer the importance of repetition, or more specifically repetitive practice, in the African context. In the instance of this series of collages dawning this subject, both Bearden and the woman depicted therein, repeat their courses of action to build upon their skills and become elders.