Romare Bearden was an African-American artist, activist, and writer. He is perhaps best remembered for his inventive paintings of black culture, as seen in his mural-sized work The Block (1971). “You should always respect what you are and your culture because if your art is going to mean anything, that is where it comes from,” the artist once said. Born on September 2, 1911 in Charlotte, NC, Bearden moved with his family to Harlem in 1914. His parents’ household became a social and intellectual hub for luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, visited by the likes of Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes. From 1935 until 1937, Bearden was employed as a cartoonist for the Baltimore publication Afro-American...