![]() ![]() Sokolowski, _Hampton Roads Collects_, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, N.Y., 1983, 19. “Art and Race Matter: The Career of Robert Colescott,” The Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH, Septem– JanuPortland Art Museum, Portland, OR, February 15 – Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL, June 20 – SeptemAkron Art Museum, Akron, OH, Octo– January 31, 2021. "Remix: A Fresh Look At Our Modern And Contemporary Art Collections," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, NovemMarch 17, 2012. "Behind the Seen: The Chrysler's Hidden Museum," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va., OctoFebruary 19, 2006. "The Bold 1980s: A Collector's Vision," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va., March 19 - October, 2003. "Robert Colescott: A Retrospective," San Jose Museum of Art, Calif., April 5 - Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio, September 11 - NovemThe Baltimore Museum of Art, Md., January 12 - FebruPortland Art Museum, Oreg., March 18 - Akron Art Museum, Ohio, June 18 - AugMuseum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Okla., September 10 - NovemContemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Tex., DecemJanuThe New Museum, New York, N.Y., February 25 - ApSeattle Art Museum, Wash., May 20 - July 15, 1989. "Robert Colescott: Another Judgement," Knight Gallery, Charlotte, N.C., February 13 - April 7, 1985. "Hampton Roads Collects," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va., July 13 - September 2, 1984. "1983 Whitney Biennial," Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, N.Y., March 15 - May 29, 1983. 155.Įxhibition History "Robert Colescott," Semaphore Gallery, New York, N.Y., November 3-27, 1982. ![]() Harrison, _American Art at the Chrysler Museum: Selected Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings_ (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2005), 252-253, no. His style is related to the Neo-Expressionists and "Bad Painters" who emerged in the late 1970s and early '80s, figure painters whose aesthetic strategies included tapping the emotional charge in coarse and violent subject matter. In the late 1980s, Colescott abandoned parody for invented scenes but continued to paint sexually and racially loaded subjects. ![]() In a much later painting, Venus I (1996), Andy's cigar, checked coat, and disembodied grin reappear disguised as a studio drape that leers suggestively at an artist's nude models. The ice cream on the woman's nipple in Listening to Amos and Andy underscores her already exaggerated sexuality. He often associates women with food sometimes the pairing signifies sexual desire, sometimes consumerism. But Colescott is also male, and his use of purposely offensive female stereotypes is more ambiguous. Since he is African-American himself, this strategy amounts to seizing a weapon and turning it against an aggressor. This is blackface comedy without the makeup Colescott transforms the white actors by giving Gosden's shadow the features of a black caricature and extending Correll's hand through the radio and into the living room, where it has black skin.Ĭolescott appropriates blackface, a relic of the minstrel show, to make a point about white prejudice. In a cartoon-like bubble in the upper right the actors are depicted: Freeman Gosden as Amos (in blue vest and cap) and Charles Correll as Andy (holding a cigar). The listeners are black-a young boy eating an ice-cream cone and an adult woman. The show came on at seven p.m., the time shown on the clock on the end table. The complication comes in what you are doing in your mind."Īlso drawing on popular culture, the Chrysler's Listening to Amos and Andy is set in a living room in the late 1920s or '30s, when "Amos and Andy" was a popular radio serial the lead characters were black, but their parts were played by two white men speaking black dialect. As Colescott has said, "A painting is like a catalyst. The jarring result raises questions about race, age, and sexuality in the context of a superficially innocent relationship. In a 1980 parody of popular culture, Shirley Temple Black and Bill Robinson White, Colescott reversed the races of Shirley Temple and her black dancing partner Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. His blackface versions of paintings by Picasso, Manet, and de Kooning are deliberately offensive, their purpose being to force viewers to recognize and acknowledge their own unconscious attitudes. With a mixture of vulgarity and satire, Robert Colescott's paintings trick their audience into laughing at racial and sexual stereotypes. 15 Lowery Stokes Sims, Robert Colescott: Recent Paintings, exhib. Kahan, Robert Colescott: A Retrospective, 1975-1986, exhib. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1983, p. References: 1983 Biennial Exhibition, exhib. Reproduction © Robert Colescott courtesy Phyllis Kind Gallery, N.Y. In memory of Mary and Dudley Cooper from the family of Joel B. ![]()
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