Romare Bearden's The Block

www.metmuseum.org

This small focus-show from the Museum's collection features Romare Bearden's muralsize collage, The Block (1971), and a dozen preliminary sketches and photographs for this project that were recently given to the Museum and are being shown for the firsttime. As a group, they reveal the artist's creative process whereby he literally and figuratively "collages" different images and experiences from reality and from his memory and imagination into a tableau that transcends the limitations of a fixed time and place, even as it pays homage to a specific street in Harlem, the New York City neighborhood that inspired so much of Bearden's work. Opened January 15, 2010. Modern Art, first floor