Robert Colescott, an American figurative painter whose garishly powerful canvases lampooned racial and sexual stereotypes with rakish imagery, lurid colors and almost tangible glee, died Thursday at his home in Tucson. He was 83.
Robert Colescott, the gifted American artist whose often outlandish but always gorgeous paintings pondered racial stereotypes and other thorny aspects of race relations in America, passed away Thursday at his home in Tucson.
Oakland native Robert Colescott, who left the Bay Area for Arizona in 1985, has returned in force with a sampling of a decade’s work at Meridian.
Ten years ago Robert Colescott represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. Rarely was there a solo exhibition at the American pavilion and it was even more amazing that this honor was awarded to an African American painter
Robert Colescott’s Interior I, 1991, is a spot-on pastiche of one of Roy Lichtenstein’s “Interiors” paintings: Here are the sterile modern furnishings, the stark outlines, the repeating dot patterns. Yet someone has shuffled in to disturb the otherwise pristine scene–a dark-skinned figure sits on the white couch, his stockinged foot plunked unceremoniously on the gleaming coffee table.
Renowned American figurative painter Robert Colescott died on June 4, 2009 at his home in Tuscon, Arizona at the age of 83.
Robert Colescott at Crown Point Press by Kathan Brown Robert Colescott is standing in the Crown Point Press studio in front of an almost-finished ambitious four-panel etching, answering questions from a small group of visitors. “It’s really about our sex life,” he confides. “Sex and race, those are my raw materials. That’s why they’re in…
Now mounted in a sumptuous exhibition at the University of Arizona Museum of Art, “Robert Colescott: Recent Paintings” first went up at the Venice Biennale a year and a half ago. The work of UA professor emeritus Colescott, these extravagantly colored, politically charged narrative paintings were the U.S. entry in the 1997 international art fair. Colescott was the first American painter since Jasper Johns in 1988 to be thus honored, and the first ever African-American artist to represent the U.S. with a solo show.
When the 47th Venice Biennale commences in mid-June, the U.S. pavilion will offer the world’s oldest, most Prestigious festival a display of 18 artworks by Robert Colescott.
Seattle is a low-key, convivial town, but when the Robert Colescott retrospective opens at the Seattle Art Museum next week, it may put some acid in the placid rain. In Cincinnati, a woman marched into the museum before the show opened and vociferously declared the artist’s work to be insulting to blacks.