Robert Colescott @ New Museum, NYC - Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott

Art and Race Matters: 

The Career of Robert Colescott

New Museum, New York

June 30 - October 9, 2022

Featuring approximately forty paintings, “Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott” highlights the sixty-year-long career of Robert Colescott. Colescott’s bold and richly rendered works traverse art history to offer a satirical take on issues of race, beauty, and twentieth century American culture. Often ahead of his time, Robert Colescott explored the ways in which personal and cultural identities are constructed and enacted through the language and history of painting. He anticipated urgent contemporary discussions around the power of images and shifting political and social values, while asserting the continuing validity of painting as a critical medium for exploring these questions. This exhibition offers a long overdue celebration of Colescott as one of the most consequential artists of his time.

Robert Colescott is perhaps best known for works made during the 1970s in which he reimagined iconic artworks to examine the absence of Black men and women as protagonists in dominant cultural and social narratives. Paintings like George Washington Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975) offer irreverent parodies of familiar masterpieces, while incisively critiquing America’s often brutally discriminatory past and present. His transgressive use of racial stereotypes to interrogate hierarchies of power was echoed in the strategies of younger artists in the 1990s such as Kerry James Marshall and Kara Walker. Along with a provocative approach to humor, Robert Colescott’s paintings also demonstrate an adventurous formal evolution and a studied analysis of the history of Modernism. In its complex interplay of high art and vernacular traditions alike, his work has opened new possibilities for chronicling the history of America while ridiculing its grandiosity and biases, exerting a profound impact on generations of artists grappling with similar issues.

This groundbreaking exhibition highlights the depth of Robert Colescott’s legacy as a standard bearer for figuration in the 1970s, a forerunner of the appropriation strategies of the 1980s, an overlooked contributor to debates around identity politics in the 1990s, and a sage pioneer in addressing some of the most challenging issues in global culture today. The exhibition builds upon the New Museum’s long history with the artist, including “Robert Colescott: A Retrospective,” a touring survey of his work that was presented at the museum in 1989.

“Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott” is co-curated by Lowery Stokes Sims and Matthew Weseley. It is organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. The presentation at the New Museum is coordinated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator.

NEW MUSEUM

235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002

www.newmuseum.org

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Robert Colescott @ George Adams Gallery, NYC - Frankly...

Robert Colescott: Frankly...

George Adams Gallery, New York

Through July 1, 2022

The George Adams Gallery presents an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by the late artist, Robert Colescott (1925-2009). Celebrated for his incisive send-ups of art-historical tropes and the experience of being a Black man in the United States, Robet Colescott’s paintings continue to engage and provoke. This exhibition will feature works predominantly from the 1990s, a period which encompasses his selection in 1997 as representative of the United States at the 47th Venice Biennale.

Race is at the center of Robert Colescott’s paintings as a meaty, many-faceted concern that he tackles from every direction. His language is one of stereotypes and appropriation, used to often-comic effect while lampooning the basis of such prejudices. Weaving figures into complex, narrative sequences that combine aspects of current events, racial politics and popular culture, Colescott brings to light the inherent contradictions of society while refusing to shirk from the less than savory aspects. From the late 1980s on, his paintings grew more complex in their compositions and layering of vignettes, references and regions of bold color. In a conversation from 1989, Robert Colescott noted this shift, explaining, “the more years I take on, the more aware I am of the complexities of it all, of life, of art, and of my reactions.”

One of the more pervasive subjects of Robert Colescott’s work is inter-racial tensions, particularly in the context of sex - as he put it, “you can’t talk about race without talking sex in America.” In the painting Frankly My Dear... I Don’t Give a Damn (1990) he references the 1939 film “Gone With the Wind” and its famous line. While one of the most lauded films in history, since its release, “Gone With the Wind” has been infamous for its problematic depiction of slavery. In the foreground of the painting, a Rhett Butler-esque man cradles a swooning woman - not the heroine of the film but a Black woman in a check dress and turban, presumably meant to indicate her servitude. Here Colescott is subverting the central love story of the movie, co-opting Butler’s parting line into a defiance of racial prejudices. Such considerations also appear in Blues’ Angel (1990), picturing a suave Black singer with a white woman in a blue dress looking on. The title is likely a reference to the New York nightclub, The Blue Angel, which opened in 1943 and was one of the first de-segregated clubs in the city. Colescott may also be playing with the name - in her blue dress, is it the woman or the singer who is the “Angel” here?

Beyond such controversial references, other, more mainstream cultural icons appear in Colescott’s work, including Dagwood Bumstead (1996), the everyman of comic fame, preparing to bite into his signature sandwich while his wife Blondie looks on disapprovingly. In a more biographical turn, the painting Signs and Monuments (Kilroy) (1999) incorporates a number of personal references while more broadly offering a send up of capitalism. The ‘Kilroy’ of the title derives from a popular graffiti tag employed by service men during WWII. Usually written as “Kilroy was here” along with a cartoon of a man peering over a wall, Colescott, who served in the Army during the war and most certainly was familiar with the image, reproduces the tag with few alterations besides abbreviating the line. Elsewhere in the painting, a bloated cartoon face features the caption ‘The Sphinx’ and a few outlines of pyramids round out the allusion to Colescott’s time spent in Cairo in the late ’60s – a formative experience.

While Robert Colescott spent less than two years in Egypt, the effect was profound. His study of Egyptian art, both ancient and contemporary, informed his approach to figurative painting, including the emergence of race as a subject that he would go on to finesse after his return to the States in 1969. It also marked a stylistic shift: his use of acrylics over oils and an increasingly colorful palette, both of which characterize Robert Colescott’s work for the rest of of his career. Particularly in his later works, there is a balance of expressionistic passages and a biting, very American satire. As Robert Colescott described it, the result is “an integrated ‘one-two punch’,” where the first impact is “‘Oh wow!’ And then, ‘oh shit!’ when they see what they have to deal with in subject matter.”

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY

38 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.georgeadamsgallery.com

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Figuring History: Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas @ Seattle Art Museum

Figuring History: Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas
Seattle Art Museum
February 15 – May 13, 2018

MICKALENE THOMAS

Tamika sur une chaise longue avec Monet, 2012 

Rhinestones, acrylic, oil, and enamel on wood panel, 108 x 144 x 2 in. 

Sydney & Walda Besthoff, Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong 

© Mickalene Thomas

The Seattle Art Museum presents Figuring History: Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas, bringing together for the first time three leading American artists from three different generations whose work challenges a Western painting tradition that historically erases or misrepresents people of color. While each artist’s paintings are distinctive in style, subject matter, and the historic moments they reference, collectively they critique and redefine mainstream narratives of history and representation. At the heart of these artists’ portrayals are material and cultural histories centered on Black experiences and perspectives.

Organized by the Seattle Art Museum, the exhibition comprises 25 large-scale paintings on loan from institutions and collections across the country. It features a work from SAM’s collection—the recently acquired Les Demoiselles d'Alabama: Vestidas (1985) by Robert Colescott—as well as three paintings made by Mickalene Thomas specifically for the exhibition. She also presents a staged “living room” installation that visitors can interact with and sit in.

SEATTLE ART MUSEUM - SAM
1300 First Avenue, Seattle, WA 98101
seattleartmuseum.org