In this book, Mary Schmidt Campbell narrates the life and art of renowned African American painter and collage artist Romare Bearden (1911–88). The author takes the reader from Bearden's origins in Charlotte, North Carolina through his decades-long development as an artist in New York City. The chapters follow Bearden's chronological trajectory, detailing his family's background and move north during the Great Migration, his youth, his education at New York University and employment as a social worker, and, most centrally, the various artistic and intellectual communities in which he operated. The book is painstakingly researched, relying heavily on archival materials from the Bearden Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art, letters to and from Bearden from a range of scholars and artists, the papers of Bearden's close friends and colleagues, and correspondence between Schmidt Campbell and Bearden. As Schmidt Campbell wrote her doctoral dissertation on Bearden, published multiple articles and chapters on his work, and curated several exhibitions on the artist and his milieu, this book in many ways represents the culmination of her decades of study and research. Schmidt Campbell ends the book with her personal reflections on Bearden and an appendix of letters Bearden wrote to her in response to her scholarly queries, alongside an extensive bibliography.

Each chapter skillfully explicates the larger context in which Bearden worked and lived. After establishing Bearden's elite southern background, the author describes his upbringing in Pittsburgh and New York. Bearden belonged to an elite Harlem household, which was particularly well known and attended due to his mother Bessye's role as a Harlem socialite and correspondent for the Chicago Defender. As a young man, Bearden was surrounded by Harlem intelligentsia, artists, and writers that Bessye invited into their home.

Throughout the book, Schmidt Campbell examines Bearden not solely as a “Negro artist,” which is often how he was positioned historically, but rather as an intellectually curious individual who formed multiple alliances among black and nonblack artists and scholars. A hallmark of his career, Schmidt Campbell notes, was Bearden's equivocation about the relationship between racial identity and artistic production. In the 1930s and early 1940s, Bearden could be considered a “race man,” as he published cartoons in journals including the NAACP's Crisis that advocated for black and workers’ rights. His social-realist compositions of the early 1940s likewise foreground African American southern rural identities, frequently connecting black traditions and subjects with Christian themes. By the mid-1940s, Bearden had turned to abstraction as a means of contemplating more universal conditions facing humankind; this work obscured indicators of identity such as race and class. Bearden returns to black representation during the civil rights movement of the 1960s with his breakthrough collages and projections. Schmidt Campbell frames Bearden's early 1940s social realism as a period of uncertainty for the artist, his foray into abstraction as an attempt to step away from racial politics, and his turn to collage as a means of returning to his exploration of the deep humanity and history of black people. Bearden's collage and projections of the 1960s are often positioned as the beginning of his “mature” artistic period. Schmidt Campbell explores the complex formal operations of these fragmented compositions. She writes, “Bearden used the destructive impulses of Cubism and collage, infusing them with the constructive force of ritual, ceremonies, and traditions to construct a new way of seeing” (222). That Bearden allows the viewer to see anew black life, history, and composition itself is a thread woven throughout the text.

Schmidt Campbell's book represents the most deeply contextualized account of Bearden's art and life to date. The author further pays exquisite attention to the spatial sense, flatness, organization, and color of his paintings and collages. By carefully situating twentieth-century trends and politics in American life more broadly – including the black migration north, the immigration of European modernists to the United States, the rise of abstract expressionism, the civil rights movement, the formation of the National Endowment for the Arts, and many other vital artistic, political, and cultural events, Schmidt Campbell reveals the larger circumstances in which Bearden developed and operated. She further details the many artists, scholars, curators, and gallery owners surrounding Bearden who proved influential. The author positions Bearden as an artist on a journey, explicating the changing environments and philosophies that informed that journey. In one of his letters to Schmidt Campbell, Bearden writes of his artistic motivations, “to mirror the Black community. To try & interpret that community in terms of a personality; in terms of art; in terms of the dignity of life” (327). Schmidt Campbell fully delivers Bearden's method of achieving these goals through her acute observations and historical details. This book is invaluable to any reader interested in Bearden, American modernism, collage, and artistic processes and evolution more broadly.