HENRI GHENT: You mentioned that you were accompanied on this trip to the Caribbean by your wife and—was it Gippo?
ROMARE BEARDEN: Well, I have a cat—Gippo the cat. And we didn’t know what to do with Gippo so we just took him.
HENRI GHENT: How old is Gippo?
ROMARE BEARDEN: Gippo will be six in August. When we got back Gippo was the official mascot of the ship. People loved Gippo and he loved the ship and he didn’t want to leave because they fed him nearly a pound of calves liver every day. He just loved it.
HENRI GHENT: Describe him.
ROMARE BEARDEN: Well, Gippo is I think a very handsome cat. He’s perfectly symmetrically striped with gray and tan markings. We found him in the woods and he has a little wildcat in him and it took a long time, about six or eight months, when he was a young kitten, to get him trained. But now he’s happy. The studio he feels is his. It’s hard to keep a cat like that for any length of time in a cage at a veterinarian’s. So we took him and it worked out quite all right. We couldn’t take him to some of the islands, like Barbados, for instance, because of . . . .
HENRI GHENT: The quarantine laws.
ROMARE BEARDEN: Yes, the quarantine laws.
HENRI GHENT: In researching some material on you I noticed that there was a cat in very many of the informal photographs. Was that Gippo?
ROMARE BEARDEN: That was Gippo, yes.
HENRI GHENT: He’s quite a star in his own right then, isn’t he?
ROMARE BEARDEN: Well, I keep telling my wife that she should have trained Gippo and used him for ads for cat food and those things because he’s a natural ham. And he’s such a handsome cat that he’d have been a perfect model.
HENRI GHENT: He loves to be photographed then? ROMARE
BEARDEN: Oh, he loves that attention.
(interview from the archives of american art)
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