Romare Bearden was born in 1911 in Charlotte, North Carolina and studied at Boston University, New York University (B.A. 1935), the Art Students League (1936-37) with George Grosz, and Columbia University. During the 1930s, Bearden was involved with 306, an art school and workshop in Harlem where his cousin by marriage, Charles Alston, was a leading instructor. From 1942 to 1945, Bearden served in the United States Army and in 1950, he used funds from the G.I. Bill to travel to Paris, where he studied art history and philosophy at the Sorbonne and met, among others, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Joan Miró. He was a founding member of Spiral group (1963), a co-founder with Norman Lewis and Ernest Crichlow of the Cinque Gallery (1969) - a non-profit organization that showed the work of minority artists, and an active founding member of The Studio Museum in Harlem (1968). Bearden's early work belongs to the school of social realism, but after his return from Europe his images became more abstract.

In the early 1960s, Bearden began to make two-dimensional collages. For Bearden the collages were "an attempt to redefine the image of man in terms of the black experience." By integrating new and old materials, Bearden created complex narratives that were often inspired by the African American experience, mythology and religion; many of his works have titles with origins in literature and music, two lifelong passions. Living and working in St. Martin, Antilles and New York City, Bearden died in 1988. In 1965, the Corcoran Gallery of Art held his first solo exhibition and since then his work has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions across the United States. In 2003, The National Gallery of Art organized "The Art of Romare Bearden," a retrospective that firmly cemented his legacy as one of the great innovators of the twentieth century. His work is represented in prestigious institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and The Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1990, the Romare Bearden Foundation, New York, was established to preserve the legacy of the artist.