Robert H. Colescott (born, Oakland, CA, 1925; died Tucson, AZ, 2009) attended San Francisco State University and the University of California Berkeley (B.A. 1949, M.A. 1952). After receiving his bachelor’s degree, he went to Paris on the GI Bill, where he studied in the studio of the French modernist Fernand Léger, who influenced Colescott’s embrace of the figure. Colescott began his career in teaching as a painting instructor in the Seattle Public Schools in 1952 and subsequently 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 1970s, he had relocated to California and was earning critical acclaim for toying with subjects of sex and race. More significantly, he depicted the Black American experience through satirical 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 Black people. 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 Black 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 the National Endowment for the Arts Award.

He is represented in public collections internationally, including the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which acquired Colescott’s iconic painting George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware (1975), and the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, following the artist’s long friendship with Arlene Schnitzer, founder of Fountain Gallery (Portland), the first gallery to represent Colescott.

Additional representation in public collections includes the Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH; Art Bridges Foundation, Bentonville, AR; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; BY ART MATTERS, Hangzhou, China; California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento, CA; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Delaware Museum of Art, Wilmington, DE; Denver Museum of Art, Denver, CO; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; de Young Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, CA; Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR; Pinault Collection, Paris, France; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA.