Robert Colescott

Robert H. Colescott (August 26, 1925 – June 4, 2009) was an American painter. He is known for satirical genre and crowd subjects, often conveying his exuberant, comical, or bitter reflections on being African American. He studied with Fernand Léger in Paris. Colescott’s work is in many major public collections, including the Albright-Knox in Buffalo, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

In 1997 Colescott was catapulted into the international limelight when he was selected to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. 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 Venice Biennale in 1997.” The only previous African-American artist to represent the United States at the Biennale was Sam Gilliam, who had participated in a group show representing the United States in 1972. 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 Queens Museum of Art, University of Arizona Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum (Oregon), University of California Berkeley Art Museum, University of Nebraska Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, now known as the Sheldon Museum of Art, Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), and the Honolulu Museum of Art Spalding House (formerly 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, and Kalup Linzy.”

Like many artists of his generation, Colescott maintained parallel careers as a committed and influential educator and painter. He moved to the Pacific Northwest after graduation from UC Berkeley and began teaching at Portland State University. He was on staff there from 1957 to 1966. In 1964 he took a sabbatical with a study grant from the American Research Center in Cairo, Egypt. He returned to Portland for a year but went back to Egypt as a visiting professor at the American University of Cairo 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, Stanislaus, UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute. Colescott accepted a position as a visiting professor at the University of Arizona 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.