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| Romare Bearden Foundation | |
|---|---|
| Name | Romare Bearden Foundation |
| Formation | 1986 |
| Founder | Mrs. Emily Bearden and family |
| Type | Nonprofit organization |
| Headquarters | Charlotte, North Carolina |
| Leader title | Executive Director |
Romare Bearden Foundation The Romare Bearden Foundation preserves and promotes the legacy of the artist Romare Bearden through stewardship of artworks, archival materials, and educational initiatives. The organization collaborates with museums, universities, galleries, and cultural institutions to support exhibitions, scholarly research, and public programming. It serves as a resource for curators, historians, artists, and students engaged with African American art and modernist practices.
Founded in 1986 by the artist's family and executors, the Foundation emerged amid conversations involving collectors and institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the National Gallery of Art. Early partnerships included exchanges with the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Hammond Museum that helped place works in prominent collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the High Museum of Art. The Foundation navigated provenance questions, conservation concerns, and loan agreements with regional museums such as the Mint Museum and academic presses at institutions like Columbia University, Yale University, and Howard University.
The Foundation's mission centers on preserving Romare Bearden's artistic corpus and promoting scholarship through fellowships, grants, and partnerships with organizations like the Getty Research Institute, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Programmatic priorities include artist residencies in collaboration with the Studio Museum in Harlem, curatorial exchanges with the Brooklyn Museum, and collaborative initiatives with university programs at Pratt Institute, New York University, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The Foundation also supports conferences and symposia hosted by the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress.
The Foundation maintains an archive of sketches, collages, correspondence, and exhibition files that inform holdings distributed across institutions including the Tate Modern, the British Museum, the Walker Art Center, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Archival materials have been cataloged and made accessible to researchers affiliated with repositories such as the Getty Research Institute, the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and the New-York Historical Society. Provenance records, conservation reports, and donation agreements coordinate with registrars at the National Portrait Gallery (United States), the Whitney Museum of American Art, and regional collections like the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.
The Foundation has organized and supported major exhibitions in partnership with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Harvard Art Museums, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Exhibition catalogues, monographs, and scholarly essays have been published with academic presses and publishers such as Routledge, Yale University Press, Princeton University Press, and Oxford University Press, and have featured contributions from curators at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Louisiana State University Museum of Art. Retrospectives and thematic shows have traveled to venues including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, and the New Orleans Museum of Art.
Educational programming has included teacher workshops in collaboration with the National Art Education Association, K–12 curriculum materials developed with the National Endowment for the Humanities, and university seminars at Duke University, North Carolina Central University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Outreach extends to public lectures featuring scholars from Columbia University, Rutgers University, and Howard University, as well as community projects conducted with cultural centers such as the Harlem School of the Arts, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and local public libraries affiliated with the American Library Association.
The Foundation is governed by a board of trustees composed of family members, art historians, and museum professionals with ties to institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. Funding sources have included private philanthropy from benefactors connected to the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, corporate support from arts patrons, and grants from public funders such as the National Endowment for the Arts and state arts councils including the North Carolina Arts Council. Financial oversight and endowment management frequently involve advisors from universities such as Duke University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Through strategic loans, scholarly collaborations, and educational initiatives, the Foundation has influenced the curation of African American art at major institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Its archival stewardship has supported research published by scholars at Harvard University, Princeton University, and Yale University, and has informed exhibitions at the Tate Modern and the National Gallery of Art. The Foundation's programs continue to shape discourse around collage, modernism, and African American visual culture at conferences hosted by the College Art Association, the African American Intellectual History Society, and the Association of Art Museum Curators.
Category:Foundations based in the United States Category:Arts organizations established in 1986