Born in Oakland, California, in 1925. His mother was a pianist and his father was an accomplished classical and jazzviolinist. Colescott developed a deep love of music early on and played instruments as a child & took up drumming at an early age and seriously considered pursuing a career as a musician before settling instead on art. The sculptorSargent Claude Johnson was a family friend who was a role model to Colescott growing up, and was also a connection to the Harlem Renaissance and artwork dealing with African-American experience. In 1940, Colescott watched as the MexicanmuralistDiego Rivera painted a mural at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island near San Francisco. Colescott went on to absorb the Western art historical canon and to explore the art of Africa and New Guinea. He would always be acutely aware what was going on in the contemporary art world. Nonetheless, these early experiences remained touchstones.[4]
As a budding artist, Colescott was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942 and served in Europe until the end of World War II. His tour of duty took him to Paris, then the capital of the art world and a city that was hospitable to African American artists. Back home, he enrolled at UC Berkeley, which granted him a bachelor's degree in drawing and painting in 1949. He spent the following year in Paris, studying with French artist Fernand Léger, then returned to UC Berkeley, earning a master's degree in 1952.
Artistic career
Early career
It was in Portland that Colescott's professional career as an artist was firmly established, thanks in large part to patron of the arts and philanthropistArlene Schnitzer, owner and director of the Fountain Gallery, which she opened to promote contemporary artists from the region. Colescott's work was included in the gallery's inaugural exhibition in 1961, and he was given his first solo show there in 1963. In a tragic incident in 1977, a fire destroyed the gallery, and many of Colescott's works burned along with the works of many other artists represented by the gallery.[5] The gallery, which reopened after the fire in a new location, continued to represent Colescott's work until it closed its doors in 1986.
Sojourns in Egypt (1964–67)
Colescott's sojourns in Egypt, and his encounter with Egyptian art and culture and the continent of Africa, were life-changing experiences. The impact on the trajectory of the rest of his artistic career, in terms of both its formal qualities and subject matter, was first manifest in the series of paintings "The Valley of the Queens", inspired by a visit to Thebes. "Three thousand years or non-European art, a strong narrative tradition, formal qualities such as the fluidity of the graphic line, monumentality of scale, vivid color and sense of pattern--all these elements had profound, immediate, and lasting impact on his work."[4]
Putting Black people into art history
George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975) at the New Museum in 2022.
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."[10]
Teaching career
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.[11]
On June 30, 2022, the New Museum in New York opened "Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott," the first Manhattan retrospective of the artist's career in more than three decades.[12]Venus Over Manhattan then showcased an exhibition titled "Robert Colescott: Women," which examined the artist's depiction of women throughout his career, featuring around thirty artworks made between 1955 and 1996.[13]
Personal life
Colescott had an older brother, Warrington Colescott Jr., of Hollandale, Wisconsin. He was also the father to five sons: Alex, Nick, Dennett, Daniel and Cooper. During his time he was also married five separate times.
Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott. Raphaela Platow and Lowery Stokes Sims, eds., New York: Rizzoli Electa, 2019.
U.S. Centre culturel américain, Paris. Trois américains: Art Brenner, Robert Colescott, Elaine Hamilton.- Exposition à Paris, Centre culturel américain, 26 février–26 mars 1969[2] [exhibition catalogue in French] (Paris, Centre culturel américain, 1969), OCLC 38695859
