For the Studio Museum exhibition The Bearden Project (2011–12), artists were invited to create works in honor of the centennial of Romare Bearden’s birth. Charles Gaines presents his admiration with String Theory: Romare Bearden, featuring meticulously drawn text overlaid on a marbled background. The selected text, told from the perspective of a young Bearden, alludes to Henry Ossawa Tanner, the acclaimed late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century painter, revered by Bearden as the sole Black artist he saw on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a child. This account displays the lineage of generations of African-American artists that Gaines has himself continued as artist, teacher, and mentor.