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Students Conjure Romare Bearden

Works of the 20th century master will be on display at the Nasher

Margaret Di Giulio crouched down and looked at Romare Bearden's collage, "Summer (Maudell Sleet's July Garden).

"This is the first time I've seen it," she said.

Di Giulio loved the collage the first time she encountered it. The riotous disorder of the birds and flowers, the mixture of colors and textures. She wrote an essay about it.

But the Duke senior had only seen slides and photocopies until she came to the Nasher Museum of Art recently to meet with her fellow student curators. They, along with Richard Powell, John Spencer Bassett professor of Art and Art History, are curating the "Conjuring Bearden" show. It opens March 4 in the gallery adjacent to "Something All on Our Own."

But there the original was, sitting on a rolling cart, ready to be mounted along with quilts, watercolors, mixed-media collages and other works.

"It's so cool seeing this all here!" Di Giulio said.

Powell is a nationally known expert on Bearden. But he was as thrilled as Di Giulio as museum staff carefully lifted tiny artworks out of a cardboard box, unwrapping them and laying them on a table. They were created for a proposed ballet called "Bayou Fever," and have never been exhibited before.

Powell walked around the cart, taking a look at another piece called "Warthog."

"That's great! That's fantastic!" he said, as he and Di Giulio discussed how the warthog fit in with the rest of the ballet pieces.

Powell and the four students have been working on the show since last summer. In addition to Di Giulio, the student curators are Alicia Garcia, Victoria Trout and Christine Wang. First Powell taught the students about Bearden, one of the most important American artists of the 20th century. The experience included a trip to the Bearden Foundation in New York. Their work continued through the academic year, as they looked at Bearden works and decided on a theme for the show.

The end result is a show that focuses on the "conjur" woman, a recurring theme in Bearden's art. Conjur women were folk healers, counselors and conduits of traditional African wisdom.

This show builds on a major retrospective by the National Gallery of Art in 2003, and includes many pieces that were not in that show, Powell said. Some of the works are on loan from local collectors as well. There also will be a lecture on Bearden by Nobel-Prize-winning poet and playwright Derek Walcott on March 9, a Thursday night film series and, on March 24 and 25, a symposium focusing on Bearden's fascination with a woman's authority over the occult and spirituality.

Di Giulio focused on Maudell Sleet, a figure that recurs in Bearden's work. One piece in the exhibit shows Maudell, a strong-looking African-American woman pictured in her garden. But in "Summer (Maudell Sleet's July Garden),"the figure of the woman is missing, and the previously tidy garden is disordered and overgrown. Although Bearden himself wrote that Maudell Sleet was not a conjure woman, Di Giulio argues that the artworks belie what Bearden has written about them.

"It's a different form of a conjure woman," she said. "Bearden is a hard person because you have to read between the lines. He's someone you have to get to through his art."