Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art questions and explores the complex and contested space of the American South. One needs to look no further than literature, cuisine and music to see evidence of the South’s profound influence on American culture, and consequently much of the world.
The Arthur Roger Gallery is very pleased to be a part of Art Miami this year. At Booth C36, we are exhibiting works by Richard Baker, David Bates, Willie Birch, Douglas Bourgeois, Robert Colescott, Stephen Paul Day, Dawn DeDeaux, Lesley Dill, James Drake, Lin Emery, David Leventi, Whitfield Lovell, Stephanie Patton, Erwin Redl and Holton Rower. The exhibition will be on view from December 2 – December 6, 2014 at the Miami Art Pavilion located in the Miami Midtown Arts District.
The Cosby-owned Colescott on view, “Death of a Mulatto Woman,” is one of the few pieces from their collection that stakes out a strong political view of the world.
30 Americans showcases works by many of the most important African American artists of the last three decades. This provocative exhibition focuses on issues of racial, sexual, and historical identity in contemporary culture while exploring the powerful influence of artistic legacy and community across generations.
In The Legacy of the Black Arts Movement, author Trey Ellis suggests that the New Breed of Black artists, writers and critics advanced a broad range of aesthetic positions that pointed to an awareness and acceptance of their “cultural mulatto” status and recognized their immersion in and indebtedness to “a multi-racial mix of cultures.”[2] The New Breed Artists regularly employed popular culture as both a playground and a tool of empowerment, using highbrow and lowbrow references that were easily interpreted by all sectors of Black society. Ellis was particularly interested in the tensions these artists experienced between their competing desires to adhere to European and American aesthetic norms and to present an alternative view of Americans whose heritage included a history of enslavement and miscegenation. This double consciousness often invited a collision between content and style, but sometimes, as in the work of Robert Colescott, this twin consciousness became inextricably intertwined as it informed form and materiality.
Robert Colescott—who was born in Oakland on August 26, 1925 and died June 4, 2009 in Tucson, AZ—was an energetic painter who pushed his presence into the history of American art completely on his own terms. His fifty-some-year oeuvre, featuring crude figuration, splashy, garish color, and blunt racial and sexual themes, was generated by a spirited mix of deep ties to past art, immersion in popular culture, committed social topics and uncompromising self-expression.
Robert Colescott, a painter whose wild brush strokes across sprawling canvases depicted the ugly ironies of race in America, died June 4 at his home in Tucson. He was 83.
Renowned UA artist’s offbeat works skewered convention Robert Colescott: 1925-2009 by Aaron Mackey, THE ARIZONA DAILY STAR With a cartoonist’s colorful flair and a cutting irony, Robert Colescott created a world filled with inverted stereotypes that challenged long-held conventions about race, sexuality and even art itself. In massive paintings, the Tucson resident and former University…
The Death of the Poet by Charles Finch, ARTNET Robert Colescott’s painting Death of Poet depicts a handsome man with an enigmatic smile staring contentedly through his memories of a mixed-up, yet satisfying life. In its way, it recalls the celebrated poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, who died in his 30s of acute alcoholism, the booze…
The American painter Robert Colescott has died. Make that great American painter. Colescott was an African-American who was best known for high-comic riffs on racial stereotypes.