In 1964, Romare Bearden exhibited a series of images of black life entitled Projections, initiating the improvisation on canonical art history and the challenge to popular stereotypes of African Americans that would characterize much of his subsequent work. Informed by Bearden's appropriation of André Malraux's idea that art is a continuously evolving semiotic system, the collages and photostat enlargements that comprise Projections participate in a complex, intertextual process of signifying identity that is one of the master tropes of African American cultural expression.