JAMES ANTHONY BEARDEN
2Rhinos, 2013

James Anthony Bearden is a sculptor working in Des Moines, Iowa.  He earned Bachelor of Arts degrees in Fine Art and Visual Communications from Grandview College in Des Moines, Iowa.  Bearden became a graphic designer after graduation and for seventeen years he was Senior Art Director for Flynn Write Advertising in Des Moines.  Later, while working as a freelance graphic designer, he learned how to work with metal and create abstract sculpture.   

Bearden has been working as a full time sculptor since 2007.  He works in series, including the Voids, Terrain, Cathedral, Assemblage, Contour, and Animals & Botanicals series.  Bearden's art has been exhibited at galleries throughout Iowa, such as the Chait Galleries Downtown in Iowa City, Octagon Gallery in Ames, and Heritage Gallery in Des Moines.  His work is in many prominent corporate and private collections, and recently he began creating public sculptures as well.  In 2013 the city of Plymouth, Minnesota commissioned Bearden to create a work of art for their City Hall, his sculpture "To Dorothy" was installed in The Iowa River Landing Sculpture Walk in Coralville, Iowa, and he was asked to create a sculpture for the Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines.

James Anthony Bearden writes:

"I strive for spacial figures in metal, a bare linear style which depends largely on rhythmic invention and a balance of dynamic movements stemming from a single fulcrum. Cutting, hammering, melting steel and bronze in an investigation of volumetric form and constructivist abstraction. Welded steel forms recalling their skeletal and weathered structure. Ancient, stripped to their natural state.

Intentional controlled construction. Brutal, fused, corroded, natural chaos bring forth tortured figural beings. Earth takes back the sculpture."

2Rhinos was commissioned by the Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines, Iowa for their new African Exhibit.

James Anthony Bearden's website