“The Anansean World of Robert Colescott”

by Davis S. Rubin

Blum Gallery, Culver City, California

Continues through May 17, 2025

Robert Colescott, “Untitled,” 1949, gouache and graphite on paper, 17 1/8 x 21 5/8 x 1 1/2”. All images courtesy of © The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; courtesy of The Trust and BLUM Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York. Photo: Evan Walsh

Growing up in a Creole family in Oakland in the 1920s and ‘30s, Robert Colescott (1925-2009) was encouraged by his mother — a descendent of African slaves whose husband was of mixed race — to pass for White. After all, he and his brother, fellow artist Warrington Colescott (1921-2018), were both light skinned, so why should they have to face the prejudices and abuses heaped upon Black folks if they could avoid them?

It wasn’t until the mid-1960s, when the younger Colescott brother was in his 40s, that he began to embrace his African heritage. While this self-awareness may have been propelled to some extent by the Civil Rights Movement, his shift in identity was largely the result of encounters with Egyptian art and culture during visits to Cairo from 1964 to ’67. Since representing the U.S. at the 1997 Venice Biennale, he has been widely acclaimed for his mature large scale paintings satirizing racism and the stereotyping of Blacks.

Robert Colescott, “KiNDRED ONE,” c. 1964, oil, graphite, and collage element on canvas, 71 1/4 x 47 7/8 x 1 7/8”.

But that is not the focus, at least the main focus of this exhibition. It was curated by L.A. artist Umar Rashid with the intention of viewing Colescott as the African trickster god Anansi, an idea that the curator believes to be an underlying characteristic of all of the work. With only 3 of the 30 exhibited works dating later than 1978, however, the show is more, and more importantly, an art historian’s treasure trove that sheds light on the relationship between Colescott’s art and his metamorphosis.

As early as 1949, in fact, Colescott was already considering race as a subject. Astutely aware of recent developments in modern art, he painted a Cubist composition in which he cleverly immersed what appear to be hooded Ku Klux Klansmen in an abstraction of geometric planes. This was about 20 years after Philip Guston portrayed a KKK member in a Social Realist painting, and another 20 before Guston would produce similar imagery in his now celebrated abandonment of Abstract Expressionism.

Robert Colescott, “Untitled,” 1976, collaged photograph on wrapping paper mounted on backing board, 23 5/8 x 34 1/8 x 1 3/4”.

Encoded racial content is also present in Colescott’s 1955 Abstract Expressionist pastel drawing, where the subject is watermelons, a common racist trope referring to Blacks. Thirty years later he painted a watermelon in one of his many reinterpretations of works from art history, “Les Demoiselles de Alabama Vestidas” (1985, not in this exhibition).

Robert Colescott, “The Siamese Twins,” c. 1976, acrylic on canvas with wooden cutouts, 100 1/2 x 73 5/8 x 1 7/8”. Photo: Josh White.

Like many other artists working in the Bay Area during the 1950s, Colescott explored the blending of Abstract Expressionist brushwork with traditional figurative subject matter. This approach became known as the Bay Area Figurative School style, and is most evident here in “Cloud Watch” (1963). Its subject of a woman looking out a window was a one explored at the time by Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff. Additionally, the slender, elongated bodies of nude female figures depicted in “Untitled” (c. 1963) and “KiNDRED ONE” (c. 1964) display striking parallels to contemporaneous works by Manuel Neri and Nathan Oliveira, but with a significant distinction. While Neri and Oliveira painted human flesh in arbitrary colors, Colescott opted for a shade of tan that approximated his own skin tone. Keep in mind that he did these works some 25 years before the identity aesthetics that prevailed in the 1990s in works such as Byron Kim’s geometric abstractions based on skin colors.

In “KiNDRED ONE” Colescott reinforces the idea that this woman is a light-skinned Black by exaggerating the jet-blackness of her pubic hair, and by literally nailing a Whiteface mask over her face. This not-so-subtle commentary on the racist convention of Whites wearing Blackface make-up would reemerge in iconic later works (again, not part of this exhibition) such as the hilarious “Shirley Temple Black and Bill Robinson White” (1980), in which the movie stars have essentially switched skin colors.

Robert Colescott, ”OLYMPiA’S FOUNTAiN,” 2000, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 72 x 1 7/8”.

Colescott’s signature narrative format emerged as early as 1970, and is represented here by an untitled painting that shows Europeans invading Africa and confronting the natives. Other works from the ‘70s reveal a variety of approaches that are as witty as the subsequent ones for which Colescott became best known. Two standouts from around 1976, the year of the United States Bicentennial, are unconventional self-portraits. In one, Colescott took a sheet of wrapping paper imprinted with a grid of photographic portraits of U.S. presidents and superimposed a photo of himself over one of the modules — an omen of the later arrival of Barack Obama. In the other, “The Siamese Twins,” Colescott shows himself peering through a window at a scene involving Siamese twins (male and female). Attached to one another by their hair, they are shown struggling to move in opposite directions. While it is reasonable to assume that Colescott was identifying with the twins as an “other,” the painting may also have been motivated by his split with his older brother (the two never spoke again after Colescott declared himself African American), or by a rocky relationship with his spouse at the time.

By the 1980s Colescott was concentrating on large-scale satires painted with thick gestural brushwork in the Bay Area tradition. The latest work in the exhibition, “OLYMPiA’S FOUNTAiN” (2000), is a dazzling, colorful example of his late style. It is both a reinterpretation of Manet’s “Olympia” (1863) and a variation on an earlier revision of the same art historical classic that Colescott painted around 1959. In the later version, the black-skinned maid is more prominent than the white-skinned courtesan. While metaphorically reflecting Colescott’s identity transformation, the painting is also a compelling affirmation of DEI. In that regard, it should come as no surprise if Colescott’s paintings are soon banned from federal museums as degenerate art.

David S. Rubin is a Los Angeles-based curator, writer, and artist. As a curator, he has held positions at MOCA Cleveland, Phoenix Art Museum, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, and San Antonio Museum of Art. As a writer he has contributed to Art and Cake, Art in America, Arts Magazine, Artweek, ArtScene, Fabrik, Glasstire, Hyperallergic, and Visual Art Source. He has published numerous exhibition catalogs, and his curatorial archives are housed in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

For more information: www.davidsrubin.com.