Bearden, lived and worked in Harlem for many of his New York years. His studio was upstairs in the Apollo Theatre building and he and others ran a workshop at 306 W. 141^st Street. He frequented the Harlem nightspots, including Minton’s, the Club Barron, and others, which became the subject of some of his collages and paintings. Romy, as he was called by his friends, loved to jazz and not only created with jazz music playing, but featured jazz scenes in many of his works. Romare, pronounced Rome – a –ree by Bearden and his family – but known to the world as Ro- MEER. It seems that when a friend introduced him to Nannette, his future wife, he pronounced it Ro-MEER, and since Nannette called him Ro-MEER, he never corrected anyone else, so that he wouldn’t embarrass her). Bearden is also being celebrated by the jazz world, concerts at the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning, Aaron Davis Hall, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, BAMcafé Live, 651 Arts in Brooklyn and the newly opened Jazz at Lincoln Center.

    Dance will also celebrate Bearden, whose art often displayed dance movements, rhythm and style, with performances at the Joyce Theatre and the Children’s Museum of Manhattan. Romy’s wife Nannette, is the founder of the Nannette Bearden Contemporary Dance Company (1970s) that has recently been reconstituted, with Sheila Rohan as Artistic Director and Walter Rutledge Associate Artistic Director and choreographers Hope Clarke and Ailey legend Dudley Williams.

    JPMorgan Chase presented The World of Romare Bearden: a symposium hosted by The Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, where Professor Robert McNealy creates great jazz programming.

The symposium featured such notables as art historian and Distinguished University Professor of Art Emeritus at University of Maryland, College Park, David C. Driskell (recipient of the National Endowment of the Humanities Presidential Medal  from President Bill Clinton), and in whose name the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora was founded at the University of Maryland; Ruth Fine, curator of the Whitney exhibition and of Special Projects in Modern Art at Washington’s National Gallery of Art; Professor Farah Griffin (former fellow at Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College and author of  Who Set You Flowin’?: The African American Migration Narrative, (and other literary works), and recently published If You Can’t Be Free Be A Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday; Frank Stewart, Senior staff photographer for Jazz at Lincoln Center, former vice president of Kamoinge Black Photographer’s Collective and friend and photographer to Bearden (his hot off the press books The Sweet Breath of Life, and Romare Bearden: Photographs by Frank Stewart join his Sweet Swing Blues on the Road written by Wynton Marsalis, and Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country by Lois Eric Elie; and Richard A. Long, cultural historian, professor and writer who authored, African American: A Portrait and The Black Tradition in American Dance and edited Black Writers and the American Civil War and co-edited Afro-American Writers: Prose and Poetry, were among the distinguished panelists. For more information on the Bearden Celebration, contact: Romare Bearden Foundation 212.924-0455.