Romare Bearden's 'Black Odyssey' Puts A Modern Harlem Twist On Classical Mythology - The Huffington Post | By Priscilla Frank

If you happen to be studying at New York's Columbia University this fall you, like many other students around the world, will be assigned to read Homer's "Odyssey," that epic epic poem about a flawed hero's journey home.

However, unlike most other students studying the classic, you'll have the remarkable privilege of digesting the text alongside Romare Bearden's "Black Odyssey," a collage series dating back to the 1970s. His jagged-edged color fields create a stream of images, 20 collages in total. The modern interpretation of the ancient Greek myth reveals that perhaps Ithaca and Harlem aren't that far apart after all.