Robert Colescott

Robert Colescott studied at San Francisco State University and the University of California Berkeley in the mid 1940s. In 1949 he went to France on the GI Bill, where he studied in the studio of the French modernist Fernand Léger. He began his career as an art teacher in the Seattle Public Schools in 1952 and then taught at Portland State University from 1957 to 1966. He later taught at the University of Arizona, Tucson becoming an Emeritus Professor.

Colescott traveled to Egypt in 1964, a trip that had an important impact on his work. By the late 1960s, he had relocated to California and was earning critical acclaim for depictions of the African American experience through ironic retellings of history and art history taking well-known images and changing white figures to Black. In the 1980s he embarked on another major series of history paintings recording forgotten or erased contributions of African Americans. Toward the end of his career, his works became increasingly abstract.

Colescott’s work has been exhibited and collected internationally. Among his many extraordinary accomplishments, he was the first African American artist to represent the United States in a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1997. Additionally, he received numerous grants, including a Guggenheim Foundation grant, and National Endowment for the Arts Award.

[source: Portland Art Museum, TAM library]