Robert Colescott

Who was Robert Colescott?

Robert H. Colescott, was an American painter. He is known for satirical genre and crowd subjects, often conveying his exuberant, comical, or bitter reflections on being African-American. He studied with Fernand Léger in Paris. According to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Colescott was "the first African-American artist to represent the United States in a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1997." According to Askart.com and Artcyclopedia.com, his work is in many major public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.

In his George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page From an American History Textbook, he re-imagined Emanuel Leutze's 1851 painting of the Revolutionary War hero, putting Carver, a pioneering African American agricultural chemist, at the helm of a boat loaded with black cooks, maids, fishermen and minstrels. With equally transgressive humor and an explosive style, he also created his own versions of Vincent van Gogh's Potato Eaters, Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait and Édouard Manet's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe.