Ask your children/students to tell you what shapes they see in The Block. Holding up paper examples of different shapes, discuss the properties of the shapes such as circumference, number of sides, and types of angles. Ask your children/students to cut shapes such as triangles, squares, rectangles, and circles out of colored index cards using scissors. Ask your children to find those shapes in The Block. Give the children colored papers, cut-out magazine pictures, glue, and scissors and ask them to make a collage of their own using these new materials and their shapes. Hang up the collages on the wall and discuss them with the group. Ask the children to talk about their work.



Read the following words of the well-known playwright August Wilson to your children/students.

In 1965, as a twenty-year-old poet living in a rooming house in Pittsburgh, I discovered Bessie Smith and the Blues. It was a watershed event in my life. It gave me history. It provided me with a cultural response to the world as well as the knowledge that the text and content of my life were worthy of the highest celebration and occasion of art …

In 1977, I made another discovery, which changed my life. I discovered the art of Romare Bearden. I was then a thirty-two-year-old poet who had taken his aesthetic from the Blues but was unsure how to turn it into a narrative that would encompass all the elements of culture and tradition … that sustains black American life … In Bearden, I found my artistic mentor and sought, and still aspire, to make my plays the equal of his canvases. In two instances his paintings have been direct inspirations. My play Joe Turner's Come and Gone was inspired by Bearden's Mill Hand Lunch Bucket, a boarding house setting in Pittsburgh. I tried to incorporate all the elements of the painting in the play, most notably the haunting and brooding figure at its center, whom I named Herald Loomis. The names of the characters, Seth and Bertha, were taken from another Bearden painting, Mr. Seth and Miss Bertha. The title of my play The Piano Lesson was taken from a painting of the same title …

I called to my courage and entered the world of Romare Bearden and found a world made in my image … A world made of scraps of paper, of line and mass and form and shape and color, and all the melding of grace and birds and trains and guitars and women bathing and men with huge hands and hearts, pressing on life until it gave back something in kinship. Until it gave back in fragments, in gesture and speech, the colossal remnants of a spirit tested through time and the storm and the lash. A spirit conjured into being, unbroken, unbowed, and past any reason for song—singing an aria of faultless beauty and unbridled hope …
— August Wilson [7]

Read a scene from one or two of Wilson's plays to the class/children as they look at Bearden's collage. Ask your children/students to compare Bearden's paintings and Wilson's written world. What similarities do they hear/see and what differences do they hear/see?

(Alternate suggestion: Read some poems by Langston Hughes, a friend of Bearden's, and discuss the similarities and differences between his poetry and Bearden's art.)

Ask your children/students to write a story, poem, or play (you choose one) that fits with the images they see in The Block. Ask them descriptive questions to jump-start their imaginations, such as: Who are the characters in your story? Where do they live in this collage? What are the characters doing? What are they wearing? What do they want most in life? What stories do they tell? What hopes and dreams do they have for themselves and for their children? Play music by Duke Ellington or Fats Waller as they work. Ask your children/students to read their work out loud and discuss. If it is a play, stage a reading with your children/students playing the characters.