10 分钟挑战：Romare Bearden 的《城市景观》

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If you enter Bellevue Hospital through the front door, on the East Side of Manhattan, and make your way up a flight of stairs near the emergency department, you’ll find this mural by the influential Black artist Romare Bearden, tucked into this out-of-the-way, fluorescently lit corner. I recently watched a group of Bellevue nurses use the mural as a healing tool for their burnout — more on that later.

Here since 1983, the mural is 26.5 feet long and 7.5 feet tall. This is life on a city block in 1970s New York, reimagined using cut-out photographs, paint, giant rectangles of colored paper and fabric, laid out with glue in a grid.

Outside, kids are playing …

… adults are chatting …

… kites are flying.

An eye embedded in brick in the center of the mural suggests an omniscient presence that pulls us inside …

… through the windows and into interior lives.

Where you can spy tender moments between a mother and a child …

… a family gathered beneath a portrait of Lincoln …

… and an annunciation that juxtaposes the sacred and the profane.

“Cityscape” was not Bearden’s first larger-than-life work drawn from his city.

In 1971, he produced “The Block,” an 18-foot-long, four-foot-tall mural of an actual block in Harlem — Lenox Avenue between 132nd and 133rd Streets.

(This mural lives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, though it’s not currently on view.)

Bearden was inspired by the view from the window of a friend,the author and scholar Albert L. Murray. In a 1980 documentary called “Bearden Plays Bearden,” he revisits the spot and describes his original process:

He likened making “The Block” to jazz, creating intervals and space, looking for repetition, and responding to the things that were happening on the page, one after another, as he cut, glued, cut, glued.

These themes of the Harlem Renaissance would show up in his work, like in “Untitled (Jazz II)” from 1980:

“I see myself,” another said.