Romare Bearden, Three Folk Musicians

Please wait while the activity loads.
If this activity does not load, try refreshing your browser. Also, this page requires javascript. Please visit using a browser with javascript enabled.

If loading fails, click here to try again

Start

Congratulations - you have completed Romare Bearden, Three Folk Musicians. You scored %%SCORE%% out of %%TOTAL%%. Your performance has been rated as %%RATING%%

Your answers are highlighted below.

Question 1

Which of these is not among the musical references and connections in this artwork?

A	The primary subject of the scene is the depiction of three figures, each playing a musical instrument
B	The group of musicians in the image were the members of a specific band called the Spiral Group which Bearden greatly admired
C	Bearden likened his artmaking process to music-making that employs improvisation, rhythm, and harmonizing
D	The instruments portrayed–the Western European guitar and African banjo–were the same played together at that time in the context of the American folk music revival

Question 2

Which of these statements does not describe elements that are repurposed or renewed in this artwork?

A	Bearden returns to the practice of collage, a process he first learned as part of his training with the early Modernist artists Picasso and Matisse.
B	To create the collage, Bearden cut previously painted paper into pieces, which are glued onto a pre-existing, abstractly painted canvas.
C	The motif of a group of musicians was previously used by early Modernist artists such as Picasso and Matisse, and even featured in earlier works by Bearden himself.
D	Bearden began his career producing figurative images and returned to it again after experimentation with abstraction in the latter part of the 1940s and 1950s.

Question 3

What were the goals of the Spiral group?

A	To spearhead a Black arts movement that the group members felt was essential to the broader Black Nationalism movement
B	To experiment with the fusion of abstraction and representation in visual artmaking
C	To explore their identity as Black artists and respond to the unfolding civil rights movement
D	To build on points of connection between Black art and the folk revival movement in music

Once you are finished, click the button below. Any items you have not completed will be marked incorrect. Get Results

There are 3 questions to complete.

←

List

→

Return

Shaded items are complete.

End

Return

Key Points

Romare Bearden is often best known for the collages depicting Black American life that he created in the 1960s. In the collages, Bearden combines cut and torn paper, taken from pre-existing drawings and paintings as well as from magazines, to portray his subjects as part of a complex and dynamic composition. In Three Folk Musicians, the complexity is heightened by the placement of the collage elements on top of an underlying, abstractly painted canvas.
Bearden was a founding member of the Spiral group, formed in 1963 and dedicated to their identity and role as Black artists within the unfolding Civil Rights Movement. At this time, Bearden began to focus on the practice of collage, specifically responding to European and American modernism by expertly blending abstraction and representation to form a unique type of socially charged imagery. His collages and other later works were integral to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
Throughout his career, Bearden maintained relationships with musicians and described his creative practice as similar to forms of improvisational music-making such as jazz. In Three Folk Musicians, the inclusion of both the Western European guitar and the African banjo reflect Bearden’s awareness of African culture and intentional fusion of it into a modern American context.

Go Deeper

This work at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Romare Bearden Foundation

Romare Bearden at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Romare Bearden from SFMOMA

Watch a video about Artist with Painting and Model by Romare Bearden from the High Museum

More to Think About

Why do you feel Bearden’s use of and approach to collage is so effective for this artwork? You might explore comparisons with other artists who used collage (such as Pablo Picasso and the Synthetic Cubists, the Surrealists, or Robert Rauschenberg) and/or consider the context of Bearden’s collages in the context of the civil rights movement.