Thanks for your patience during our recent outage at scalar.usc.edu. While Scalar content is loading normally now, saving is still slow, and Scalar's 'additional metadata' features have been disabled, which may interfere with features like timelines and maps that depend on metadata. This also means that saving a page or media item will remove its additional metadata. If this occurs, you can use the 'All versions' link at the bottom of the page to restore the earlier version. We are continuing to troubleshoot, and will provide further updates as needed. Note that this only affects Scalar projects at scalar.usc.edu, and not those hosted elsewhere.
Romare Bearden (1911-1988) In the Garden, from the “American Portfolio," 1979 (published 1980)
12019-09-03T19:04:06-07:00Lauren Cesirof37e4e52c3d9a4ff08b7937020ee9048f11c6739346703Label & Mediaplain2019-09-04T12:02:58-07:00Lauren Cesirof37e4e52c3d9a4ff08b7937020ee9048f11c6739 In this lush summertime scene, a barefoot woman wearing a pink gingham dress stands in her garden, holding a basket or a bowl of flowers. She is surrounded by blossoming foliage, enclosed by a brick wall over the top of which we glimpse a house, its two black windows like eyes peering into this private enclave. She could be any proud Southern gardener, but the deliberate gesture she makes—the two fingers of her right hand raised skyward—suggests other possibilities. Bearden spoke of her as a kind of Eve in the Garden of Eden, but imagined here in the guise of a “conjur” woman, a healer. He saw such healers as a link across time, describing how their knowledge “had been passed on through generations from an African past.”
In his later sixties at the time he made this print, Bearden has abandoned his earlier use of photomontage in favor of cutting out and assembling larger, flat planes of vibrant color into this evocation of a Southern landscape.
