[3] Bearden became a founding member of the Harlem-based art group known as Spiral, formed to discuss the responsibility of the African-American artist in the civil rights movement.

[8] Romare's mother, Bessye Bearden, played an active role with the New York City Board of Education, and also was the founder and president of the Colored Women's Democratic League.

During this time he supported himself by working as a political cartoonist for African-American newspapers, including the Baltimore Afro-American, where he published a weekly cartoon from 1935 until 1937.

[18] Mack offered Bearden a place on the Athletics fifteen years before Jackie Robinson became the first Black player in major league baseball.

[21] After two summers with the Boston Tigers, an injury made him rethink the attention he was giving to baseball and he put greater focus into his art, instead.

His early paintings were often of scenes in the American South, and his style was strongly influenced by the Mexican muralists, especially Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco.

[9] Making major changes in his art, he started producing abstract representations of what he deemed as human, specifically scenes from the Passion of Jesus.

He had evolved from what Edward Alden Jewell, a reviewer for the New York Times, called a "debilitating focus on Regionalist and ethnic concerns" to what became known as his stylistic approach, which participated in the post-war aims of avant-garde American art.

"[25] According to Bearden, Christ's life, death, and resurrection are the greatest expressions of man's humanism, because of the idea of him that lived on through other men.

[26] This is in accordance with his times, during which other noted artists created abstract representations of historically significant events, such as Robert Motherwell's commemoration of the Spanish Civil War, Jackson Pollock's investigation of Northwest Coast Indian art, Mark Rothko's and Barnett Newman's interpretations of Biblical stories, etc.

Bearden turned to music, co-writing the hit song "Sea Breeze", which was recorded by Billy Eckstine and Dizzy Gillespie.

He also spent much time studying famous European paintings he admired, particularly the work of the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, and Rembrandt.

Over time the group expanded to include Merton Simpson, Emma Amos, Reginald Gammon, Alvin Hollingsworth, Calvin Douglas, Perry Ferguson, William Majors and Earle Miller.

The sixteen-foot-wide mural, incorporating many visual aspects of the city in collage style, was installed in late 1973 and received positive reviews.

[32] During the 1970s, he participated in a community art space called Communications Village operated by printmaker Benjamin Leroy Wigfall in Kingston, NY.

[33][34] In the early 1980s, the Maryland Transit Authority commissioned Bearden $114,000 to create "Baltimore Uproar", a 14' x 46' Venetian glass mosaic for the Upton–Avenue Market station.

"[38] In 1942, Bearden produced Factory Workers (gouache on casein on brown kraft paper mounted on board), which was commissioned by Forbes magazine to accompany an article titled The Negro's War.

[39] The article "examined the social and financial costs of racial discrimination during wartime and advocated for full integration of the American workplace.

"[40] Factory Workers and its companion piece Folk Musicians serve as prime examples of the influence that Mexican muralists played in Bearden's early work.

[43] After helping to found an artists group in support of civil rights, Bearden expressed representational and more overtly socially conscious aspects in his work.

He used these glossy scraps to incorporate modernity in his works, trying to show how African-American rights were moving forward, and so was his socially conscious art.

Bearden wanted to show how the water that is about to be poured on the subject being baptized is always moving, giving the whole collage a feel and sense of temporal flux.

"A well-read man whose friends were other artists, writers, poets and jazz musicians, Bearden mined their worlds as well as his own for topics to explore.

"[48] In 2008 a 1984 mural by Romare Bearden in the Gateway Center subway station in Pittsburgh was estimated as worth $15 million, more than the cash-strapped transit agency expected.

This collage describes one of the scenes in Homer's epic Odyssey, in which the hero Odysseus is returning home from his long journey.

"[52] In addition, he said that collage's technique of gathering several pieces together to create one assembled work "symbolizes the coming together of tradition and communities.

The non-profit organization is not only Bearden's official estate; it helps "to preserve and perpetuate the legacy of this preeminent American artist.

[62] In 2014-15, Columbia University hosted a major Smithsonian Institution travelling exhibition of Bearden's work and an accompanying series of lectures, readings, performances, and other events celebrating the artist.

[63] For a 2005 U.S. postal stamp sheet commemorating ten important milestones of the Civil Rights Movement, Beardon's 1984 lithograph "The Lamp" was selected to illustrate the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.

Postal Service released a set of Forever stamps featuring four of Bearden's paintings during a first-day-of-issuance ceremony at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.