My earliest memories of looking at art, seriously and intently, come from when I was a child growing up in Baltimore. I spent hours staring at reproductions of Romare Bearden’s work that my grandmother had on her walls. She loved him and we would make special trips to the Baltimore Museum of Art to “see the Beardens.” She would talk about his work and say his name with a certain deep tone and joyful inflection—I could feel that the images affected her deeply.