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COLEMAN 20

While Ellison is referring to the writer's vision, his description is most appropos [[apropos]] when one considers the works of visual artists such as Romare Bearden.  Bearden's Ritual Bayou Series of 1970, specifically works such as Carolina Interior, Memories, Mississippi Monday, and The Prevelance [[Prevalence]] of Ritual Series, those works such as Baptism and Copper Women, both of 1964, are certainly drawn from the artist's experience as a young boy in North Carolina. In these and other series and individual works, Bearden joins the remembered past with the vital present to make concrete "projections" of reality that hold and transform our respective visions of ourselves.

Even those artists who were not from the South and who had only brief stays there participate in the shared memories of the South.  New Jersey native Jacob Lawrence (1917- ) and Massachusetts native Lois Mailou Jones (1905- ) are not exceptions in this regard.  Although she has spent most of her professional life since 1929 in Washington, D.C., Jones did experience the harsh segregation associated with the Deep South while working at the Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, North Carolina in 1928.  Jones was to treat themes of social protest periodically but one that perhaps alludes to her memories of North Carolina is Mob Victim, painted in 1940.  Lawrence spent less time in the Deep South than did Lois Mailou Jones.  However, much of Lawrence's early work deals with the South.  Certainly the Frederick Douglass series (1938-39); Harriet Tubman series (1939-1940); The Migration of the Negro (1940-41) are related to a genetic racial memory of the South.  Lawrence, however, actually completed the John Brown series while in New Orleans.