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Pérez Art Museum Miami
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Romare Bearden Evening 9:10, 461 Lenox Avenue 1964
© 2022 Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
In 1964, Romare Bearden created 21 small collages, which he then converted into large black-and-white images using a Photostat machine, a precursor to the modern photocopier. Among the earliest artistic usages of this process, Projections, as the series is known, depicts highly emotive scenes of everyday African American life in rural and urban contexts.
Evening 9:10, 461 Lenox Avenue portrays three individuals—two men and one woman—sitting around a dining table playing cards in a cramped Harlem apartment. The image bears the quality of an intimate, first-person eye-witness account, providing a rich and highly specific visual description of mundane life. At the same time, it hums with an underlying sense of the familial and community bonds that unite its subjects.
Identification
Title
Evening 9:10, 461 Lenox Avenue
Production Date
1964
Object Number
2015.90
Credit Line
Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase with funds provided by Jorge M. Pérez, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and PAMM Ambassadors for Black Art
Copyright
© 2022 Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
https://www.pamm.org/en/artwork/2015.90
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Physical Qualities
Medium
Photostat
Dimensions
50 1/2 x 66 inches
Visual Description
Evening 9:10, 461 Lenox Avenue by Romare Bearden is a collage of photostat mounted on fiberboard. It measures four feet tall by five and a half feet wide and is hung in landscape orientation meaning its longest side runs parallel to the floor.
The piece depicts three figures playing cards in an apartment in Harlem. It is made by collage which is a process of taking material from various sources and assembling them together to create something new.
Starting from the top left there is a window and within its crossed frame a dense view of high-rises that place the scene in New York City. The wall surrounding the window is a mixture of greys, blacks, and faded greens. In fact, most of the piece occupies this color range, implying that the source images were printed. Underneath the window there is a banjo resting on the wall. To the far right of the window there is a light fixture hanging down above the central figures. Underneath the light, there is a door in the distance, what appears to be a bed or couch, and towards the bottom of the composition, a clock with its hands depicting 9:10.
The central figures that dominate the composition are sitting around a table and playing a card game. Two of them are men and the other is a woman. They appear to be smiling and are well-dressed in suits, ties, and a dress. Their entire bodies and faces are made of different pieces of printed images, cut up and collaged together. Their eyes, noses, ears, lips, torso, arms, and hands are all from different sources and distorts the figures. It is possible to see the overlaying of different pieces of paper and the difference in texture.
