Troy,

1979

Romare Bearden is best known for collages of magazine clippings and colored paper that celebrate African American life and history. Ralph Ellison once said that Bearden’s collages convey the “paradoxes, reversals, telescoping of time and Surreal blending of styles, values, hopes and dreams which characterize much of Negro American history.” By the time this piece was created, Bearden was almost exclusively utilizing colored paper cutouts, which he sometimes translated into prints, as seen here. Bearden populated this scene from The Iliad with dark-skinned ?gures, correcting the exclusion of Blacks from the canon of Western literature and art and aligning Odysseus’s trials with the struggles of African Americans.