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Harlem, his childhood community, erupted like communities all over the country into civil insurrection. The distortions, energy, and vivid images of Bearden's first collages, black and white photographic blowups, were the seismographic readings of the turbulence within the inner cities. For Bearden the cynical detachmnt of Pop Art, the unemotional cool of minimalism, simply were not an option for him. Moreover, when Bearden opened the door-not only to the force of contemporary events but to the rush of memory and potent images from his past-he closed the door forever to the obsessive "art for art's sake" purism that had dominatd American mainstream art up until that point. And it was in connecting his personal memories to large archetypal themes in painting and in literature that he assumed a public rather than private aethetic.
[[strikethrough]] Bearden was at the forefront, too, of another important cultural movement, the establishment of places for the exhibition and support of so-called "alternative" visions. If the years immediately after World War II witnessed the coming of age of the great modernist institutions-the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Guggenheim-the years during the Civil Rights Movement witnessed the first serious challenge of these mainstream museums by a host of alternative spaces that took root in out-of-the-way lofts and storefronts. Bearden was personally involved in the founding and early support of at least three of them-the Storefront Museum, Cingue Gallery, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In the 1960s and 1970s in New York City community institutions sprang up which supported not only Black American art but all kind of cultural expressions the mainstream museums for one reason or another would not accommodate: the New Museum, the Institute for Contemporary Art/P.S.1, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Caribbean Cultural Center, El Museo del Barrio, Artists Space, the Alternative Museum, the Asian-American Institute, and so on. These young organizations recognized the value in creating the kind of public presence that the art of those who challenged the mainstream needed for their survival.[[/strikethrough]]
The new world Bearden wanted to create out of his "Negro experience" was different from mainstream art in one other significant regard. His new art was value-laden. His paintings had what Susi Gablik would call a "moral center." Throughout his collage works there are references to good and evil. The conjure woman can cast spells; she can harm or she can heal. There are heroes and heroines. Mudell Sleet is an admirable toiler in the fields, and work, hard labor, is celebrated as an ennobling activity and fundamental to Black American survival. Women often ombody moral judgements. She-Ba is regal; the nude woman in the garden is a dangerous temptress. In the urban scenes, on the city streets, there is violence that is destructive, yet thre is also redemption and a transforming vision that allows hope. Like the sacred rituals that bring to life West African masks (masks that appear over and over in Bearden's work), or the stained-glass-like quality of his collages, which calls to mind the scriptural lessons displayed in the windows of a Gothic cathedral, Bearden's collages depend on an underlying moral view of the world.

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[[strikethrough]]Bearden's willingness to take a moral position reflected what would become a growing disaffection among younger artists with the disconnectedness of post-World War II art. Even the most cursory look back at the 1980s confirms this. The most important work of public art, Maya Linn's Vietnam War memorial, quietly condemns the waste of individual human life without diminishing the heroism of the men and women who sacrificed their lives. The lynch fragments of Melvin Edwards-pieces constructed as early at 1963- are harsh judgements against racial violence and at the same time herald a transcendental attitude towards the violence. More recently, David Wojnarowicz' condemnation of the official repression of the information on AIDS or Maria Brito-Avellana's child carved like a santeria out of a crib, are examples of works that rest firmly on the artists' cultural traditions and values. Clearly, Bearden set a tone that would prevail at the fin de siecle.
Works of this type require an art history very different from what we have had in the past for contemporary art. Understandng the works of artists who fill their art with history, biography, cultural values, and traditions requires much more than the descriptive rhapsodizing required for work with only a visual content. [[/strikethrough]] Bearden's work signaled the need for patient iconographic study; his personal biography, the history of the Black American, the aesthetic traditions on which he draws, all this knowledge is a requirement, as well as the willingness to believe that art in the twentieth century can have a moral center. In many ways this willingness to look at the visual arts as moral humanistic study may be the greatest challenge the work poses.
Will historians be up to the task? History, like the art itself, will probably have to experience an explosive redefinition. Globalism is unavoidable in the twentieth century and, given that fact, a mainstream is obsolete. If that is indeed the case the challenge for the new historians will be, as it was with Bearden's collages, to define its own dictionary, its own critical language and its own self-definition.