In its time, Bearden has seen a motley assortment of pioneers, some of them immigrants, some of them rare African American landowners, spread alongside the toll road into the western wilderness; the first railroad ever built through East Tennessee; Knoxville's first eighteen-hole golf course; the dawn of aviation in East Tennessee, and Knoxville's first municipal airport; a major brick factory, a landmark hat factory, and the biggest rose-production plant in the South; the junction of two of America's first national automobile routes, spawning half a century of tourist camps, motor courts, and motels; jazz nightclubs and slot-machine speakeasies; drive-in restaurants, movie theaters, and bootlegging joints; Knoxville's first cinema multiplex; and too many interesting residents to count, including some cutting-edge musicians, a Pulitzer-winning novelist, and a groundbreaking inventor. This narrative attempts to tell it all as one story, the story of Bearden.

Foreword by Bridget Moore. Text by Robert G. O'Meally.

Romare Bearden (1911–1988), one of the most prolific, original, and acclaimed American artists of the twentieth century, richly depicted scenes and figures rooted in the American South and the Black experience. Bearden hailed from North Carolina but was forced to relocate to the North when a white mob harassed his family in the 1910s. His family story is a compelling, complicated saga of Black middle-class achievement in the face of relentless waves of white supremacy. It is also a narrative of the generational trauma that slavery and racism inflicted over decades. But as Glenda Gilmore reveals in this trenchant reappraisal of Bearden's life and art, his work reveals his deep imagination, extensive training, and rich knowledge of art history. Gilmore explores four generations of Bearden's family and highlights his experiences in North Carolina, Pittsburgh, and Harlem. She engages deeply with Bearden's art and considers it as an alternative archive that offers a unique perspective on the history, memory, and collective imagination of Black southerners who migrated to the North. In doing so, she revises and deepens our appreciation of Bearden's place in the artistic canon and our understanding of his relationship to southern, African American, and American cultural and social history.

By the time of his death in 1988, Romare Bearden was most widely celebrated for his large-scale public murals and collages, which were reproduced in such places as Time and Esquire to symbolize and evoke the black experience in America. As Mary Schmidt Campbell shows us in this definitive, defining, and immersive biography, the relationship between art and race was central to his life and work -- a constant, driving creative tension. Bearden started as a cartoonist during his college years, but in the later 1930s turned to painting and became part of a community of artists supported by the WPA. As his reputation grew he perfected his skills, studying the European masters and analyzing and breaking down their techniques, finding new ways of applying them to the America he knew, one in which the struggle for civil rights became all-absorbing. By the time of the March on Washington in 1963, he had begun to experiment with the Projections, as he called his major collages, in which he tried to capture the full spectrum of the black experience, from the grind of daily life to broader visions and aspirations. Campbell's book offers a full and vibrant account of Bearden's life -- his years in Harlem (his studio was above the Apollo theater), to his travels and commissions, along with illuminating analysis of his work and artistic career. Campbell, who met Bearden in the 1970s, was among the first to compile a catalogue of his works. An American Odyssey goes far beyond that, offering a living portrait of an artist and the impact he made upon the world he sought both to recreate and celebrate.

Proceedings of a symposium organized by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art which was held Oct. 24-25, 2003 in Washington.

A history of Killeen, Texas, written by Gerald D. Skidmore, who was managing editor of the Killeen Daily Herald for 42 years and worked 13 years for the Killeen Chamber of Commerce.

Bearden's Odyssey: Poets Responding to the Art of Romare Bearden is a collection of thirty-five poems by the most celebrated African diaspora poets in the United States, presented together with full-color reproductions from Bearden's famous Odyssey series.