Robert H. Colescott (August 26, 1925 – June 4, 2009) was an American

painter Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and ai ...

. He is known for

satirical Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of shaming or e ...

genre and crowd subjects, often conveying his exuberant, comical, or bitter reflections on being

African American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...

. He studied with

Fernand Léger Joseph Fernand Henri Léger (; February 4, 1881 – August 17, 1955) was a French painting, painter, sculpture, sculptor, and film director, filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of cubism (known as "tubism") which he gradually ...

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

. Colescott's work is in many major public collections, including (in addition to the Albright-Knox) those of the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

in New York, the

Corcoran Gallery of Art The Corcoran Gallery of Art was an art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, that is now the location of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, a part of the George Washington University. Overview The Corcoran School of the Arts & Design ...

, the

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was ...

, the

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The Museum of Fine Arts (often abbreviated as MFA Boston or MFA) is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works ...

, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Biography

Colescott developed a deep love of music early on. His mother was a

pianist A pianist ( , ) is an individual musician who plays the piano. Since most forms of Western music can make use of the piano, pianists have a wide repertoire and a wide variety of styles to choose from, among them traditional classical music, ja ...

and his father was an accomplished classical and

jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major ...

violin The violin, sometimes known as a ''fiddle'', is a wooden chordophone (string instrument) in the violin family. Most violins have a hollow wooden body. It is the smallest and thus highest-pitched instrument (soprano) in the family in regular ...

ist. They moved from

New Orleans New Orleans ( , ,New Orleans
Merriam-Webster. ; french: La Nouvelle-Orléans , es, Nuev ...

Oakland, California Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast of the United States, West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third ...

, where Colescott was born in 1925. He took up

drum The drum is a member of the percussion group of musical instruments. In the Hornbostel-Sachs classification system, it is a membranophone. Drums consist of at least one membrane, called a drumhead or drum skin, that is stretched over a she ...

ming at an early age and seriously considered pursuing a career as a musician before settling instead on art. The

sculptor Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sc ...

Sargent Claude Johnson Sargent Claude Johnson (October 7, 1888 – October 10, 1967) was one of the first African-American artists working in California to achieve a national reputation.

was a family friend who was a role model to Colescott growing up, and was also a connection to the

Harlem Renaissance The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the t ...

and artwork dealing with African-American experience. In 1940, Colescott watched as the

Mexican Mexican may refer to: Mexico and its culture *Being related to, from, or connected to the country of Mexico, in North America ** People *** Mexicans, inhabitants of the country Mexico and their descendants *** Mexica, ancient indigenous people ...

mural A mural is any piece of graphic artwork that is painted or applied directly to a wall, ceiling or other permanent substrate. Mural techniques include fresco, mosaic, graffiti and marouflage. Word mural in art The word ''mural'' is a Spani ...

ist Diego Rivera painted a mural at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island near

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

. Colescott went on to absorb the Western art historical canon and to explore the art of

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...

and

New Guinea New Guinea (; Hiri Motu Hiri Motu, also known as Police Motu, Pidgin Motu, or just Hiri, is a language of Papua New Guinea, which is spoken in surrounding areas of Port Moresby (Capital of Papua New Guinea). It is a simplified version of ...

. He would always be acutely aware what was going on in the contemporary art world. Nonetheless, these early experiences remained touchstones.Miriam Roberts
''Robert Colescott: Recent Painting''
; SITE Santa Fe;

University of Arizona Museum of Art The University of Arizona Museum of Art (UAMA) is an art museum in Tucson, Arizona, operated by the University of Arizona. The museum's permanent collection includes more than 6,000 works of art, including paintings, sculptures, prints and drawin ...

(Miriam Roberts, 1997), As a budding artist, Colescott was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942 and served in

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

until the end of

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. His tour of duty took him to Paris, then the capital of the art world and a city that was hospitable to African American artists. Back home, he enrolled at

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

, which granted him a bachelor's degree in drawing and painting in 1949. He spent the following year in Paris, studying with French artist

, then returned to

, earning a master's degree in 1952.

Artistic career

Early career

It was in Portland that Colescott's professional career as an artist was firmly established, thanks in large part to

patron of the arts Patronage is the support, encouragement, privilege, or financial aid that an organization or individual bestows on another. In the history of art, arts patronage refers to the support that kings, popes, and the wealthy have provided to artists su ...

and

philanthropist Philanthropy is a form of altruism that consists of "private initiatives, for the Public good (economics), public good, focusing on quality of life". Philanthropy contrasts with business initiatives, which are private initiatives for private goo ...

Arlene Schnitzer Arlene Schnitzer (née Director; January 10, 1929 – April 4, 2020) was an American arts patron and philanthropist. She was the founder and director of the Fountain Gallery, established in Portland to showcase artists in the Pacific Northwest. Sh ...

, owner and director of the Fountain Gallery, which she opened to promote

contemporary art Contemporary art is the art of today, produced in the second half of the 20th century or in the 21st century. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world. Their art is a dynamic com ...

ists from the region. Colescott's work was included in the gallery's inaugural exhibition in 1961, and he was given his first solo show there in 1963. In a tragic incident in 1977, a fire destroyed the gallery, and many of Colescott's works burned along with the works of many other artists represented by the gallery. The gallery, which reopened after the fire in a new location, continued to represent Colescott's work until it closed its doors in 1986.

Sojourns in Egypt (1964–67)

Colescott's sojourns in Egypt, and his encounter with Egyptian art and culture and the continent of

, were life-changing experiences. The impact on the trajectory of the rest of his artistic career, in terms of both its formal qualities and subject matter, was first manifest in the series of paintings "The

Valley of the Queens The Valley of the Queens ( ar, وادي الملكات ) is a site in Egypt, where the wives of pharaohs were buried in ancient times. It was known then as Ta-Set-Neferu, meaning "the place of beauty". It was most famous for being the burial site ...

", inspired by a visit to Thebes. "Three thousand years or non-European art, a strong narrative tradition, formal qualities such as the fluidity of the graphic line, monumentality of scale, vivid color and sense of pattern--all these elements had profound, immediate, and lasting impact on his work."

Putting Black people into art history

Beginning in the mid-1970s, Colescott began creating works based on iconic paintings from art history.Honolulu Museum of Art, wall label, ''Olympia'' by Robert Colescott, 1984, accession TCM.2001.2 His ''Olympia'', in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, reimagines Manet's ''Olympia'' with the Black servant as an equal. Colescott's ''George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page From an American History Textbook'' (1975), based on Emanuel Leutze's 1851 painting of the Revolutionary War hero, putting Carver, a pioneering African American agricultural chemist, at the helm of a boat loaded with Black cooks, maids, fishermen and minstrels. With equally transgressive humor and an explosive style, he also created his own versions of

Vincent van Gogh Vincent Willem van Gogh (; 30 March 185329 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionism, Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about 2 ...

's '' Potato Eaters'' (1975),

Jan van Eyck Jan van Eyck ( , ; – July 9, 1441) was a painter active in Bruges who was one of the early innovators of what became known as Early Netherlandish painting, and one of the most significant representatives of Early Northern Renaissance art. Ac ...

's ''

Arnolfini Portrait ''The Arnolfini Portrait'' (or ''The Arnolfini Wedding'', ''The Arnolfini Marriage'', the ''Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife'', or other titles) is a 1434 oil painting on oak panel by the Early Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck. It fo ...

'' (1976), and

Édouard Manet Édouard Manet (, ; ; 23 January 1832 – 30 April 1883) was a French modernist painter. He was one of the first 19th-century artists to paint modern life, as well as a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism. Born ...

's '' Dejeuner sur l'Herbe (1980).''

First retrospective

In 1987, the

San Jose Museum of Art The San José Museum of Art (SJMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum in downtown San Jose, downtown San Jose, California, United States. Founded in 1969, the museum holds a permanent collection with an emphasis on West Coast of the United Sta ...

organized the first major

retrospective A retrospective (from Latin ''retrospectare'', "look back"), generally, is a look back at events that took place, or works that were produced, in the past. As a noun, ''retrospective'' has specific meanings in medicine, software development, popu ...

of Colescott's work. Museum director John Olbrantz curated the exhibition. After its presentation in San Jose, the exhibition traveled under the auspices of the Art Museum Association of America to the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, the Baltimore Museum of Art,

Portland Art Museum The Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon, United States, was founded in 1892, making it one of the oldest art museums on the West Coast and seventh oldest in the US. Upon completion of the most recent renovations, the Portland Art Museum becam ...

(Oregon),

Akron Art Museum The Akron Art Museum is an art museum in Akron, Ohio, United States. The museum first opened on February 1, 1922, as the Akron Art Institute. It was located in two borrowed rooms in the basement of the public library. The Institute offered clas ...

Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art The Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art is an art museum on the University of Oklahoma campus in Norman, Oklahoma. Overview The University of Oklahoma’s Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art holds over 20,000 objects in its permanent collection. The museum c ...

University of Oklahoma The University of Oklahoma (OU) is a Public university, public research university in Norman, Oklahoma. Founded in 1890, it had existed in Oklahoma Territory near Indian Territory for 17 years before the two Territories became the state of Oklahom ...

, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, the New Museum in New York City, and the Seattle Art Museum. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalog entitled ''Robert Colescott: A Retrospective, 1975-1986'', with an essay by Lowery Stokes Sims, a longtime champion of Colescott's work, and a republication of the essay "Robert Colescott: Pride and Prejudice" by Mitchell D. Kahan.

Venice Biennale

In 1997 Colescott was catapulted into the international limelight when he was selected to represent the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

at the

Venice Biennale The Venice Biennale (; it, La Biennale di Venezia) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of ...

. According to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Colescott was "the first African-American artist to represent the United States in a solo exhibition at the

in 1997." The exhibition was organized by U.S. Commissioner Miriam Roberts, an independent curator. Following its presentation in the United States Pavilion in Venice (June 15 - November 9, 1997), the exhibition embarked on a three-year tour of museums that included the

Walker Art Center The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in the Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is one of the most-visited modern and contemporary art museums in the United States and, t ...

, the Queens Museum of Art,

(Oregon), University of California Berkeley Art Museum, University of Nebraska

Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery The Sheldon Museum of Art is an art museum in the city of Lincoln, in the state of Nebraska in the Midwestern United States. Its collection focuses on 19th- and 20th-century art. History Sheldon Art Association In 1888, The Sheldon Art Assoc ...

and Sculpture Garden, now known as the Sheldon Museum of Art,

Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans) The Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans is an arts complex located in historic downtown New Orleans. Founded in 1976, the center plays host to events and performances from visual arts to concert performances and lectures. General gallery admis ...

, and the Honolulu Museum of Art Spalding House (formerly known as The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu). The exhibition catalog includes essays by Roberts and Lowery Stokes Sims, a poem by Quincy Troupe, and a photo essay by artist Carrie Mae Weems, to honor Colescott's influence on a younger generation artists in general and African-American artists in particular. According to his obituary by Roberta Smith: "While Mr. Colescott’s work was overtly political and multicultural, it was often at odds with the academic earnestness of such approaches. In his disregard for simplistic dualities regarding race and sex, he helped set the stage for transgressive work by painters like Ellen Gallagher, Kerry James Marshall, Sue Williams and Carroll Dunham and multimedia artists like Kara Walker,

William Pope.L Pope.L (also known as William Pope.L, born 1955 in Newark, New Jersey) is an American visual artist best known for his work in performance art, and interventionist public art. However, he has also produced art in painting, photography and theater ...

, and

Kalup Linzy Kalup Linzy (born July 23, 1977) is an American video and performance artist who currently lives and works in Tulsa, OK. His performance are characterized by their low-tech quality, themes of community, socializing, family, the church, sexuality a ...

2022 Retrospective

On June 30, 2022, the New Museum in New York opened "Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott," the first Manhattan retrospective of the artist's career in more than three decades.

Teaching career

Like many artists of his generation, Colescott maintained parallel careers as a committed and influential educator and painter. He moved to the

Pacific Northwest The Pacific Northwest (sometimes Cascadia, or simply abbreviated as PNW) is a geographic region in western North America bounded by its coastal waters of the Pacific Ocean to the west and, loosely, by the Rocky Mountains to the east. Though ...

after graduation from UC Berkeley and began teaching at

Portland State University Portland State University (PSU) is a public research university in Portland, Oregon. It was founded in 1946 as a post-secondary educational institution for World War II veterans. It evolved into a four-year college over the following two decades ...

. He was on staff there from 1957 to 1966. In 1964 he took a

sabbatical A sabbatical (from the Hebrew: (i.e., Sabbath); in Latin ; Greek: ) is a rest or break from work. The concept of the sabbatical is based on the Biblical practice of ''shmita'' (sabbatical year), which is related to agriculture. According to ...

with a study grant from the American Research Center in

Cairo Cairo ( ; ar, القاهرة, al-Qāhirah, ) is the capital of Egypt and its largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the largest urban agglomeration in Africa, the Arab world and the Middle East: The Greater Cairo metro ...

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediter ...

. He returned to

Portland Portland most commonly refers to: * Portland, Oregon, the largest city in the state of Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States * Portland, Maine, the largest city in the state of Maine, in the New England region of the northeas ...

for a year but went back to Egypt as a visiting professor at the

American University of Cairo The American University in Cairo (AUC; ar, الجامعة الأمريكية بالقاهرة, Al-Jāmi‘a al-’Amrīkiyya bi-l-Qāhira) is a private research university in Cairo, Egypt. The university offers American-style learning programs ...

from 1966 to 1967. When war broke out, he and his family (then-wife Sally Dennett and their son Dennett Colescott, born in Portland, Oregon in 1963) moved to Paris for three years. They returned to California in 1970 and he spent the next 15 years painting and teaching art at

Cal State The California State University (Cal State or CSU) is a public university system in California. With 23 campuses and eight off-campus centers enrolling 485,550 students with 55,909 faculty and staff, CSU is the largest four-year public universi ...

, Stanislaus, UC Berkeley and the

San Francisco Art Institute San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately ...

. Colescott accepted a position as a visiting professor at the

University of Arizona The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a public land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it was the first university in the Arizona Territory. T ...

in Tucson in 1983, and joined the faculty in 1985. In 1990 he became the first art department faculty member to be honored with the title of

Regents' Professor Professors in the United States commonly occupy any of several positions of teaching and research within a college or university. In the U.S., the word "professor" informally refers collectively to the academic ranks of assistant professor, asso ...

Personal life

Robert Colescott died June 4, 2009, in Tucson AZ. Robert Colescott had a brother Warrington Colescott Jr. of Hollandale, Wis.; and five sons: Alex Colescott, Nick Colescott, Dennett Colescott, Daniel Colescott and Cooper Colescott. Robert Colescott had 3 grandchildren: Colescott Rubin from Dennett Colescott; and Hutton Colescott and Holly Colescott from Cooper Colescott.

References

Bibliography

*''Robert Colescott: A Retrospective''. John Olbrantz, 1987; San Jose Museum of Art. *''Robert Colescott: Recent Paintings''. Miriam Roberts; SITE Santa Fe;

,

(Miriam Roberts, 1997) *''Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott''. Raphaela Platow and Lowery Stokes Sims, eds., New York: Rizzoli Electa, 2019. *U.S. Centre culturel américain,

. ''Trois américains: Art Brenner, Robert Colescott, Elaine Hamilton.- Exposition à Paris, Centre culturel américain, 26 février–26 mars 1969'

xhibition catalogue in French(

, Centre culturel américain, 1969), OCLC 38695859

External links

*D. K. Row
"Robert Colescott: 1925-2009"
(obituary), ''The Oregonian'', June 5, 2009. Retrieved June 6, 2009
Museum of Modern Art (NYC)
discussion and COLOR IMAGE of Colescott's 1989 painting, "Emergency Room", in the MOMA collection.
Corcoran Gallery page on Robert Colescott work in the collection
ith COLOR IMAGEbr>Askart.com pages on Robert Colescott
ith COLOR IMAGESbr>Artcyclopedia on Robert Colescott
ith links to COLOR IMAGESbr>Artnet.com pages on Robert H. Colescott
ith COLOR IMAGESbr>Artnet.com pages on Robert's older artist brother Warrington Colescott (Jr.)
ith COLOR IMAGESbr>Albright-Knox Museum bio on Robert Colescott
ith COLOR IMAGEbr>Crown Point Press bio on Robert Colescott
*
Three Graces at the Bathers Pool: Venus is Still Venus
', 1985. Baltimore Museum of Art.
Robert Colescott: A Retrospective
exhibition at the New Museum, February 24—April 16, 1989.
Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott
exhibition at the New Museum, 6/30/22 to 10/09/22. {{DEFAULTSORT:Colescott, Robert 1925 births 2009 deaths 20th-century American painters American male painters 21st-century American painters 21st-century American male artists Artists from Oakland, California African-American contemporary artists American contemporary artists American contemporary painters 20th-century American printmakers Neo-expressionist artists African-American printmakers 20th-century African-American painters 21st-century African-American artists 20th-century American male artists