Romare Bearden: Bayou Fever and Related Works, DC Moore Gallery March 23 to April 29, 2017.
Excerpted from the D.C. Moore press release:
DC Moore Gallery’s new exhibition, “Romare Bearden: Bayou Fever and Related Works,” features a series of twenty-one vibrant collages from 1979 that Bearden conceived for a ballet that invokes African American traditions and the African presence that is deeply rooted in the Louisiana bayou near New Orleans, and elsewhere in North America and the Caribbean. Never before shown in New York, the collages represent the main characters and settings of a performance that he hoped would be choreographed by Alvin Ailey.
Bearden (1911-1988) had worked with Ailey before, most notably two years earlier when he created a scrim for the ballet, Ancestral Voices. He had been interested in dance for some time, as his wife had her own company, the Nanette Bearden Contemporary Dance Theater. While the Bayou Fever dance was never performed, the bold imagery of Bearden’s collages speaks to the power of his visual imagination and narrative strength of his original concept.
Ritual, magic, and mystery infuse the Bayou Fever series. Much of the storyline centers on a confrontation between the Conjur Woman and the Swamp Witch, in a dramatic struggle between good and evil that plays out in a rural cabin deep in the bayou. Overall, the dance’s imagery incorporates many of the most prominent motifs and elements found in Bearden’s art, including strong women, elders, musicians, Caribbean masquerade figures, domestic interiors, and rural landscapes, in addition to the powerful Conjur Woman. His costume designs for the characters in the dance often combine photos of African masks with pieces of cloth and textiles.
Link to artist’s page:
http://www.dcmooregallery.com/artists/romare-bearden
