At the Savoy

During the 1930s, while Bearden was working as an artist for the Works Progress Administration, he and friends would often spend time at the Savoy Ballroom, the legendary Harlem dance palace. The Savoy showcased some of the greatest jazz bands and singers in the country, including Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, whose pulsing improvisational jazz rhythms attracted to its floors many of the artists, musicians and writers who formed the core of the Harlem Renaissance movement. Bearden's memories of this seminal period found their expression in Of the Blues, a series of nineteen collages created during 1975. In these works, including At the Savoy, as well as a related series of monoprints, Of the Blues: Second Chorus, Bearden explored the improvisational possibilities of collage and other mediums in a way that mirrored jazz performance and dance.