Tucson’s most critically acclaimed artist was laid to rest in Sierra
Vista last weekend.
Internationally known for explosive paintings that audaciously
examined racial stereotypes, Robert Colescott, 83, died at his home on
June 4. He had been in declining health for several years, said painter
Alfred Quiroz, his friend and former student.
In 1997, Colescott became the first African American chosen to
represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, the international
art fair, and the first U.S. painter selected since Jasper Johns in
1988. But in his adopted hometown, he was almost unknown.
“I don’t have any profile in Tucson, and I like it that way,” he
told the Tucson Weekly in 1997, weeks before he was to head to
Venice and command the attention of art cognoscenti from around the
world. “The local paper carrying me makes me a little queasy.”
Colescott arrived in the Old Pueblo in 1983 to teach at the UA as a
visiting art professor, and he returned in 1985 as a full-fledged
professor with tenure. He was elevated to regents’ professor in 1990.
He retired in 1995, and lived on five peaceful desert acres on the
southwest side until illness forced a move into midtown, Quiroz
said.
He was already 58 when he first arrived in Tucson, an “art star,
getting publicity all over the country,” Quiroz said. “He had already
been on the cover of Artforum.”
The painter first rocketed to fame in 1975 with a series of jazzily
painted art-history satires. Colescott reworked about a dozen famous
paintings, converting them from icons of Western culture to lampoons of
its worst racial tropes. His “George Washington Carver Crossing the
Delaware” was helmed by the black scientist instead of the father of
our country; crewing the boat were black caricatures drawn from popular
culture, like Aunt Jemima and minstrels in blackface.
In “Eat Dem Taters,” he appropriated Van Gogh’s “Potato Eaters,”
replacing Van Gogh’s glum peasants with happy-go-lucky black slaves.
The daredevil paintings were laugh-out-loud funny and deadly
serious.
“He was parodying everybody,” Quiroz said. “He was satirical toward
blacks, whites, everyone. His art was very funny.”
Not everyone got the joke. Sometimes, viewers interpreted the
paintings as embracing stereotypes that were too painful to be amusing.
One time, Quiroz said, a woman at a gallery took offense at Colescott’s
take of the biblical story of Susannah and the elders. In the Bible,
the aged Peeping Toms leer at her in her bath, but Colescott put his
Susannah in the shower. Quiroz laughed out loud at the update, and the
woman glared at him. “Do you think rape is funny?” she demanded.
Colescott was born in Oakland in 1925, the child of classically
trained musicians who had fled to California from New Orleans “to get
away from segregation,” Colescott told me in 1997. Even so, the Golden
State didn’t offer his parents musical opportunities, and his violinist
father made his living as a porter for the Southern Pacific
Railroad.
“My dad was a poor working stiff,” Colescott said. “He worked on the
railroad in the dining car for 41 years. But he was very musical.”
The Army was Colescott’s ticket to college. He served in Europe
during World War II, and at war’s end got an art degree at the
University of California at Berkeley on the GI Bill. He had passed
through Paris during the war years and returned to study with Fernand
Léger, a leading French cubist. The young painter was trying out
abstraction, the cutting-edge style of the postwar years, but
Léger helped push Colescott toward figuration.
“I brought him some geometric abstractions—he was not into
abstraction anymore. He was very helpful. He got me to think more about
the figure as a subject matter,” Colescott remembered.
Once Colescott switched to figurative art, he merged his love of
thick pigment, wild colors, jumpy lines and chaotic composition with
outrageous social commentary. He credited a sabbatical year in Cairo,
in 1964, with transforming his art yet again. In Africa, he was
liberated from “the limitations of European art,” he told the Los
Angeles Times; he began to “draw on other sources. Race became part
of my subject matter. It was the most crucial year of my life.”
By the 1970s, when he began showing in New York, high-art tastes
were shifting. Abstract “painting and sculpture had come to the end of
the line, and expressive, narrative painting was the next step out the
door. For me to show figurative work, it was the right time.”
He nearly always held teaching jobs, first in the Seattle public
schools and then at multiple universities, including Portland State
University, the American University in Cairo, Berkeley and the San
Francisco Art Institute.
At the UA, Colescott mentored Quiroz as a grad student. No other
professors wanted to take on a Mexican-American artist intent on
painting about racial injustices in U.S. history, Quiroz said. “We
always discussed racial issues, the subtlety of racism.”
After Quiroz joined the faculty, the two of them were the only
minority professors. Colescott enlisted him in a seriocomic
mini-protest when they had their work relegated to a back
room—Colescott called it the “jungle room”—at the annual
faculty show at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. They carried
“tiki mugs”—brown mugs decorated with Easter Island-type
gods—to the opening to protest the segregation of their work,
Quiroz said.
Colescott’s Biennale show didn’t come home to roost in Tucson until
late 1998, a year and a half after it wowed the world in Venice.
Exhibited at the UA museum, it was his first and only big show in town.
In reviewing the 17 large acrylics on canvas, I wrote, “Colescott’s
work on a visceral level is a joyful, jazzy explosion of color, a
delirious amalgam of thick paint and edgy lines; on the cerebral level,
it’s an attack on racism and all its works by an artist
provocateur.”
Robert Colescott is survived by his wife, Jandava Cattron, five sons
from four previous marriages, and one grandson. His youngest son,
Cooper, 22, lives in Tucson.
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2009.
