47th Venice Biennale U.S. Pavilion
A Cultural Presentation of the United States of America
Robert Colescott
Recent Paintings/Opere Recenti
Organized by Miriam Roberts, United States Commissioner
in association with SITE SANTA FE
June 15-November 9, 1997
[Right] Associated Press. “Italy - Biennale Exhibition.” YouTube, AP Archive, 16 June 1997.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Robert Colescott
Robert Colescott (1925-2009) is widely recognized today as one of the most important American painters of his generation. In 1997, as the first African-American artist to represent the US in a single artist exhibition at the Venice Biennale, Colescott opened the door to Fred Wilson (2003), Mark Bradford (2017), Martin Puryear (2019), Simone Leigh (2022), and the first Native American artist, Jeffrey Gibson (2024).
Born in Oakland, California to two professional jazz musicians in 1925, Robert Colescott experienced life committed to art from a young age. After serving in the army in France during World War II, Colescott enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, where he would eventually receive his masters degree in 1951. He studied with Fernand Léger in Paris in 1949 before establishing his career in Portland with his first solo show at the Fountain Gallery in 1963.
Colescott's sojourn in Egypt, initiated during his one-year artist's fellowship at the American Research Center in Cairo in 1964 and continued two years later when he returned to teach at the American University, deeply influenced the rest of his career. Colescott found his voice, his identity, and his subject all at once: an inside-out critique of contemporary American culture from an African-American perspective. His paintings, he said, "are not about race, they are about perceptions."
POEM BY QUINCY TROUPE
Robert Colescott’s “One-Two Punch”
To make Colescott’s work more accessible to broad and diverse viewers—with an international audience in mind—Quincy Troupe was commissioned to write a poem for the catalog.
Robert Colescott’s “One-Two Punch” was inspired by a visit to Colescott in his Tucson, Arizona, studio. Troupe read the poem during the vernissage in Venice at a beautiful outdoor luncheon at the Hotel Cipriani hosted by SITE SANTA FE.
Troupe, Quincy. Choruses. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1999. Video courtesy of the University of Arizona Poetry Center Audiovisual Archive.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Robert Colescott’s paintings are filled with contradictions and dichotomies: between art and life, tragedy and comedy, men and women, Black and white, oppressor and victim, Europe and Africa, past and present, but never “us” and “them.” Above all, it is a world of ironies, where people, things, and events are never quite what they first seem.
Even when they express outrage, Colescott's paintings evoke the possibility of a world where stereotypes are debunked, beauty is appreciated, and human relationships are complex and multi-dimensional.
[Left] Robert Colescott, Venus I, 1989, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 114", Museum of Modern Art. New York, Jerry 1. Speyer and the Millstream Funds © The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
[Right] Robert Colescott, El Tango, 1995, Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York & Chicago, © 2024 The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
ABOUT THE ARTWORKS
Narrative is an essential part of Colescott’s work, as is questioning the meaning of history and the power derived from it. Colescott's paintings are counternarratives that confront conventional wisdom, authority, delusion, and denial ingrained in culture.
Encoded messages create layers of questions for viewers, who begin by trying to decipher the messages and the artist's intentions and often end by finding themselves, along with the artist and the rest of humanity, personally implicated. In depicting the absurdity of spoken or unspoken assumptions-like that of white male superiority-Colescott undermines the foundation on which western civilization, more or less, stands.
[Left] Robert Colescott, School Days, 1988, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 114, Denver Art Museum, Denver funds from N.B.T. Foundation © The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1991, uses Victor Hugo's masterpiece as a point of departure, kaleidoscoping time and space to ridicule the double American stereotype of the Black man as sports hero and sexual predator. In a classic Colescott race reversal, the central figure of the literary hunchback is now Black. Counterpoised is a Black athlete, carrying the ball (traditionally made of pigskin) for the "Fighting Irish" football team of Notre Dame, a Catholic university located in America's "heartland." As a further counterpoint, Colescott inserts an homage to Goya's Saturn Devouring His Children in the form of a white man cannibalizing a Black man.
"Colescott's narratives moved away from ironic homages to specific historical art works towards archetypes, myths, allegories, and literary allusions as jumping off points for commentary on contemporary issues." - Miriam Roberts
[Left] Robert Colescott, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1991, Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York & Chicago, © 2024 The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
"The will to get along in honesty and understanding is not about language differences. It's about character and perception." - Robert Colescott
Many of Colescott's paintings initially stand as visual jokes, complete with a set-up, a punchline, and a butt, using the standard tools of exaggeration, irony, caricature, and satire. Viewers are lured into Colescott's world by the overpowering formal strength of the paintings and their biting humor, but they also become entangled in deciphering the artist's intentions.
In The Bilingual Cop, 1995, a sneering policeman spews epithets in two languages, turning the traditionally-benign concept of bilingualism upside down and going beyond mere differences in language to ridicule stereotypical images at the heart of cultural conflicts. Colescott's first depiction of the American Southwest, the work evokes a landscape that is simultaneously physical, social, and psychological.
[Left] Robert Colescott, The Bilingual Cop, 1995, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Museum Purchase. Contemporary Collectors Fund, © 2024 The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
ABOUT THE ARTWORKS
Colescott's work questions the meaning of history, the relationships between men and women, differing standards of beauty in various cultures, and the power derived from controlling those standards. Viewers often find themselves, along with the artist and the rest of humanity, implicated in a world of exploitation, missed opportunities, unfulfilled potential, lost love, and above all, ironies.
His work stands as the perfect model of how to democratize art without compromise or condescension. Through a sophisticated synthesis of figuration and abstraction, gravity and humor, popular culture and history, narrative and counternarrative, his lush compositions remind us that painting is first and foremost a sensual experience with the power to deepen our sense of what it means to be human.
[Right] Robert Colescott, Arabs: The Emir of Iswid (How Wide The Gulf), 1992, Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York & Chicago, © 2024 The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
"In this painting from 1994 Colescott revisits two recurrent themes: rewriting US history to include Black people and interracial relations. It references the Second Seminole War and the role of Black men who had escaped from enslavement and fought alongside Indians against the US government, as described in a letter to Acting Secretary of War Benjamin Butler written by General Thomas Sydney Jesup upon assuming command in Florida in 1836." - Miriam Roberts.
"Well, the Buffalo Nickel is gone, appropriately so, since the buffalo are gone. Most people don't know there were Black tribes-Seminole and Choctaw. Escaped slaves became Choctaw warriors and fought the white man to a standstill in the swamps. "This is not an Indian war," the General said, 'but a Negro war.'" - Robert Colescott
[Right] Robert Colescott, Choctaw Nickel, 1994, acrylic on canvas, 84" x 72”, New School for Social Research, New York, Vera List Center for Art & Politics, Gift of Vera List © The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
"Action is not taken until things get drastic. Everything is dealt with in expediency. The U.S. is the Emergency Room. The patient is already dead when the doctor is called." - Robert Colescott
Emergency Room, 1989, takes a real-life drama familiar from a thousand T.V. shows as the basis for a scathing allegory on the dire state of race relations in the United States.
"In comparing Colescott's work from this decade to the challenges faced by South African playwrights in the post-apartheid era who were dealing with the struggles within racial groups as well as between them, Lowery Stokes Sims wrote: "Emergency Room, an intense drama from 1989, illustrates Colescott's take on the situation: a brick countenance (reminiscent of Man Ray's 1936 portrait of the Marquis de Sade) stoically observes acts of self-destruction and internecine struggle unfolding before it." - Miriam Roberts
[Right] Robert Colescott, Emergency Room, 1989, Museum of Modern Art. New York, Jerry 1. Speyer and the Millstream Funds, © 2024 The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Because they dealt so directly with issues like racial stereotyping, sex, and materialism from an African-American perspective, Colescott's works had a hard time finding acceptance within the art establishment from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. But they did find admirers among younger artists working in non-traditional media, many of them African-American.
One such artist, David Hammons, remembers it this way:
"Robert Colescott's the force. Through his paintings, I found a way of bringing humor to the seriousness of my work. I wanted to make sculpture with that same feeling in it.... He's playing with all these things, using himself as a subject and getting mixed up in the art world."3
Colescott’s work has influenced generations of African American artists, including Hammons as well as Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Joyce Scott, Michael Ray Charles, and many others.
*3 Interview of David Hammons by Louise Neri, "No Wonder," Parkett 31, 1992, p. 50 ff.
[Right] Robert Colescott, The Star: A View from the Pinnacle, 1987, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, © 2024 The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Filled with diverse references to the history of art itself, Colescott's paintings are not only in homages to specific historical works, but to the traditional conventions of painting, portraiture, landscape, still life, and allegory. Formally, they are infused with elements from European modernism, the structure of cubism, the gesture of expressionism, the monumentality of Mexican muralists, and the visual and verbal puns of dada. The sculpture of Africa and New Guinea contribute to the artist's sense of proportion and his use of distortion and exaggeration.
Colescott's paintings are the work of a contemporary American painter fully aware of the entire spectrum of American and African-American art and culture in its "high" and "low" forms, from African-American quilts to the Harlem Renaissance, from abstract expressionism to pop art, from outsider art to comic books.
[Right] Robert Colescott, A Visit from Uncle Charlie, 1995, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 72", Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York & Chicago © The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
ARTIST PORTRAIT
Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Framed by Modernism), 1996, Gelatin silver prints
When Miriam Roberts was curating the exhibition, she asked Colescott what photographer he wanted to take his picture for the catalog. Much to her surprise he suggested Carrie Mae Weems. Weems, who was also initially surprised by the idea, agreed, thinking that if he wanted someone like her to do it, he was not just looking for a traditional headshot. The triptych that emerged from their collaboration in his studio in Tucson, Arizona, presented such a powerful conceptual framework for the paintings that the decision was made to include it in the exhibition.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Miriam Roberts
Miriam Roberts is an art historian and independent curator who lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from 1994 to 2023 and currently resides in Eugene, Oregon. She was the first independent curator to organize the exhibition for the United States pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Her reflections on organizing the exhibition, "Robert Colescott Then & Now," were included in the publication for the traveling retrospective exhibition Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott, organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati.
EXHIBITION CHECKLIST
1. The Star: A View from the Pinnacle, 1987, acrylic on canvas, 84" x 72"
New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York
2. School Days, 1988, acrylic on canvas, 90" x 114"
Denver Art Museum, Denver funds from N.B.T. Foundation
3. Grandma and the Frenchman: Identity Crisis, 1990, acrylic on canvas, 84" x 72"
James & Maureen Dorment, Rumson, New Jersey
4. White Boy, 1989, acrylic on canvas, 84" x 72"
Gordon D. Sondland and Katherine J. Durant. Portland, Oregon
5. El Tango, 1995, acrylic on canvas, 84" x 72"
Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York & Chicago
6. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1991, acrylic on canvas, 90" x 114"
Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York & Chicago
7. Exotique, 1994, acrylic on canvas, 84" x 72"
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1995
8. Hard Hats, 1987, acrylic on canvas, 84" x 72"
Howard & Judy Tullman, Chicago
9. Heartbreak Hotel(Reservations), 1990, acrylic on canvas, 84" x 72"
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.. Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 1991
10. Emergency Room, 1989, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 114"
Museum of Modern Art. New York, Jerry 1. Speyer and the Millstream Funds
11. A Taste of Gumbo, 1990, acrylic on canvas, 84" x 72"
Arlene and Harold Schnitzer, Portland, Oregon
12. A Visit from Uncle Charlie, 1995, acrylic on canvas, 84" x 72"
Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York & Chicago
13. Between Two Worlds, 1992, acrylic on canvas, 84" x 72"
Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York & Chicago
14. Triumph of Christianity, 1993, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 114"
Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York & Chicago
15. Venus I, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 84" x 72"
Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York & Chicago
16. Venus II, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 84" x 72"
Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York & Chicago
17. Arabs: The Emir of Iswid (How Wide The Gulf), 1992, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 72"
Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York & Chicago
18. The Bilingual Cop, 1995, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 114"
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Museum Purchase. Contemporary Collectors Fund
19. Choctaw Nickel, 1994, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 72”
New School for Social Research, New York, Vera List Center for Art & Politics, Gift of Vera List
Exhibition Tour
The exhibition was accompanied by a bilingual publication, Robert Colescott Recent Paintings/Opere Recenti, with an essay by Miriam Roebrts.
Following the presentation in Venice, a slightly revised version of the exhibition had a successful two-year tour of museums in the US under the auspices of the Museum of Art at the University of Arizona where Colescott was Regents Professor of Art from 1990 until he retired from teaching in 1995. The exhibition catalog was republished without the Italian translation and the addition of a second essay by Lowery Stokes Sims, the pre-eminent Colescott scholar.
Walker Art Center
Minneapolis, Minnesota
January 25-April 5, 1998
The Queens Museum of Art
Queens, New York
April 20-August 27, 1998
University of Arizona Museum of Art
Tucson, Arizona
October 20, 1998-Jatisary 5, 1999
Portland Art Museum
Portland, Oregon
January 22-April 4, 1999
University of California Berkeley Art Museum
Berkeley, California
May 12-August 29, 1999
Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden
University of Nebraska at Lincoln
September 15, 1999-January 2, 2000
Support
Official U.S. participation in the 47th Venice Biennale is made possible by major support from the Fund for U.S. Artists at International Fantas Exhibitions, a public/private partnership of the United States information Agency, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts, with administrative support from A International, a division of the Institute of International Education. The Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions, a standing committee of the National Endowment of the Arts, provides curatorial guitar to the Fund Partners in selecting the Commissioner of the U. S. Pavilion and the artist representing the United States.
[Right] Robert Colescott, White Boy, 1989, Gordon D. Sondland and Katherine J. Durant. Portland, Oregon, © 2024 The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
The official U.S. exhibition of the 47th Venice Biennale is managed by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S.I.A, in cooperation with the U.S. Embassy in Rome and the International Partnerships Office, the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, D.C. The US. Pors owned and administered by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice Generous additional funding for this project has been provided by the Richard Florsheim Art Fund, Tampa, Florida; the L.E.F. Foundation, St. Helen California; and Cline LewAllen Contemporary and Cline Fine Art, Santa Fe Critical financial support for this publication has been provided by Aren and Harold Schnitzer and the Gordon D. Sondland and Katherine J. Durant Foundation, Portland, Oregon, and the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
[Right] Robert Colescott, A Taste of Gumbo, 1990, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 72", Arlene and Harold Schnitzer, Portland, Oregon © The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
