Angelou, Bearden featured in interview film to be shown at Reynolda House

A 40-year-old interview between two major Black artists will be shown this month at Reynolda House Museum of American Art. 

Romare Bearden, a native of Charlotte, was an influential painter known for his “Black Odyssey” series and many other works.

Poet and author Maya Angelou is one of the country's best-known Black writers who spent the last decades of her life in Winston-Salem.

In 1982, they both sat on the porch of Reynolda House for an interview by local author Emily Herring Wilson about their lives and the Black experience's influence on their works.

That conversation was captured in a film that will be shown on August 16 as part of the museum's exhibit "Still I Rise: The Black Experience at Reynolda."

Bari Helms is director of archives and library for Reynolda House. She says the museum is trying to uplift more diverse voices about its past, and the conversation between Angelou and Bearden is part of that story.

“This is a significant moment in Reynolda's past,” Helms says. “And to be able to revisit it 40 years later, because so much of what Maya Angelou and Romare Bearden are discussing is still relevant today.”

The film screening will be followed by a panel discussion including experts from the Delta Arts Center, Wake Forest University and Reynolda House.