A lot of things in the paintings are autobiographical. . . . They’re about tensions that I’ve had in my own life. They’re about my humanity and my desires (and some of the pitfalls of those desires and those passions) and about my imperfections.
Robert Colescott, in an interview with Ann Shengold, in Robert Colescott: Another Judgment, ed. Terry Maxon Miller (Charlotte, NC: Knight Gallery/Spirit Square Arts Center, 1985).
In Robert Colescott’s lively and intense canvases, layered depictions of stereotypes, myths, and distortions of collective memory implicate the artist, the viewer, and society at large. They profess a deep skepticism about moral progress in contemporary American culture. Colescott’s imaginative scenarios are based on his own feelings and experiences as a Black man and as an artist. His parents, who hailed from Louisiana, moved to Oakland during the Great Migration in 1919. Colescott studied history, economics, political science, international relations, and eventually art at the University of California, Berkeley, on the GI Bill. After graduating in 1949, he spent a year in Paris studying with avant-garde painter Fernand Léger, who helped the young artist learn to express himself through painting the figure. At first, Colescott painted for himself: “I had to visualize some of the hateful things I felt.”1 His work found an audience slowly, but teaching and living on the West Coast, particularly in the Bay Area, gave him “the freedom to work, to be different and peculiar.2
Robert Colescott’s painterly depictions of women overlaid with racial nuances provide some of his most brash imagery. Though many carry sexual undertones, curator Lowery Stokes Sims argued that the disturbing edge of these works in the wake of the Women’s Liberation Movement is more suggestive of male fears than a voyeuristic male gaze.1 Colescott satirized the idealized white suburban life in The Dutiful Son (1979), in which a lumpy mother lounges, smoking and reading on the couch, while her son, wearing a ruffled apron, vacuums the rug. Colescott’s depiction of a white middle-class family freed from the entrapment of gender roles makes for an uncomfortable domestic dynamic, perhaps anticipating the consequent white male fear of being demoted to an inferior social position.
Lowery Stokes Sims, “Robert Colescott: 1975–1986,” in Robert Colescott: A Retrospective (San José, CA: San José Museum of Art, 1987), 5. ↩︎
The San José Museum of Art organized the first major retrospective of Robert Colescott’s paintings in 1987. Curated by Lowery Stokes Sims, who was then Associate Curator of Twentieth-Century Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Robert Colescott: A Retrospective, 1975–1986 highlighted the irony and humor of his increasingly expressive style. Beginning in 1975 Colescott appropriated Western art history paintings with the primary objective of putting Black people into art history,1 as in his remake of Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 history painting of George Washington leading troops across the Delaware River. In George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975), Carver, the famous African American scientist, takes the place of the Revolutionary War general, his troops a raucous boat full of Jim Crow–era stereotypes of African Americans—barefoot buffoons, mammies, cooks, and a banjo player.2 With a sharp edge Colescott used token representations and minstrel-like caricatures, the very images of Blackness created by white culture, to turn appropriation on its head: “the reformulated art object serves as a code by which society reveals itself.”3
Lowery Stokes Sims, “Robert Colescott: 1975–1986,” in Robert Colescott: A Retrospective (San José, CA: San José Museum of Art, 1987), 2. ↩︎
Lowery Stokes Sims, “Bob Colescott Ain’t Just Misbehavin’,” Artforum, March 1984, 57. ↩︎
Mitchell D. Kahan, “Robert Colescott: Pride and Prejudice,” in Robert Colescott: A Retrospective (San José, CA: San José Museum of Art, 1987), 25. ↩︎
Photographer and video artist Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953) collaborated with Robert Colescott to produce a series of three photographs, in which a nude Weems poses next to a large painting in the back corner of Colescott’s studio. Though cast as the nude model—the object of the male gaze, ubiquitous in representations of women throughout history—Weems framed the images in her own words, literally inscribing herself—the photographer—into their encounter. Colescott appears vulnerable; his head in his hands, he’s half-dressed, with suspenders down and no shoes. Weems addresses him: “You framed the likes of me and I framed you,” she writes in the final image, “But we were both framed by modernism,” suggesting that as Black artists and individually as a Black woman and a Black man, both negotiated themselves within the perceptions of the viewer and the wider art world.1
Franklin Sirmans, “Carrie Mae Weems: A World of Her Own,” Studio Magazine, Winter/Spring 2014, 20. ↩︎
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