of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Following that tour it has been in storage while the City Hall building has awaited a seismic retrofit and the city council has been meeting elsewhere. A portion of the mural inspired the city's current logo. Personal life and death In 1954, at age 42, Bearden married Nanette Rohan, a 27-year-old dancer from Staten Island, New York. She later became an artist and critic. The couple eventually created the Bearden Foundation to assist young artists. Bearden died in New York City on March 12, 1988, due to complications from bone cancer. The New York Times described Bearden in its obituary as "one of America's pre-eminent artists" and "the nation's foremost collagist." Early works His early works suggest the importance of African Americans' unity and cooperation. For instance, The Visitation implies the importance of collaboration of black communities by depicting intimacy between two black women who are holding hands. Bearden's vernacular realism represented in the work makes The Visitation noteworthy; he describes two figures in The Visitation somewhat realistically but does not fully follow pure realism, and distorts and exaggerates some parts of their bodies to "convey an experiential feeling or subjective disposition." Bearden said, "the Negro artists [...] must not be content with merely recording a scene as a machine. He must enter wholeheartedly into the situation he wishes to convey." In 1942, Bearden produced Factory Workers (gouache on casein on brown kraft paper mounted on board), which was commissioned by Forbes magazine to accompany an article titled The Negro's War. The article "examined the social and financial costs of racial discrimination during wartime and advocated for full integration of the American workplace." Factory Workers and its companion piece Folk Musicians serve as prime examples of the influence that Mexican muralists played in Bearden's early work. Collage Bearden had struggled with two artistic sides of himself: his background as "a student of literature and of artistic traditions, and being a black human being involves very real experiences, figurative and concrete," which was at combat with the mid-twentieth century "exploration of abstraction". His frustration with abstraction won over, as he himself described his paintings' focus as coming to a plateau. Bearden then turned to a completely different medium at a very important time for the country. During the civil rights movement, Bearden started to experiment again, this time with forms of collage.