Excerpt: Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott

6

7

DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD 500 WORDS

8

9

WESELEY

40

FIG. 26

Fig. 26: Robert Colescott, Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder, 1979, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 66 inches, collection of the Portland Art Museum, gift of Arlene and Harold Schnitzer in honor of Brian Ferriso, 2006.96

ROBE RT COL E SCO T T

41

has left the painting on the easel unfinished might imply a loss of interest in it, according to Parker. It might be significant that Colescott has depicted himself darkening the skin of the dancers in Matisse’s original, just as he has darkened his own complexion in this painting. During the years when Colescott lived and worked in the Bay Area, between his return in 1970 and his departure for Tucson, Arizona, in 1985, Colescott taught at several local educational institutions. After four years teaching at Stanislaus, Colescott became a visiting lecturer at his alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley, on a part-time basis, and he also taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. He hoped to join the faculty at Berkeley as a permanent, full-time faculty member, and he applied repeatedly for an open position. Ultimately, though, he was passed over for the job. After accepting a teaching position at the University of Arizona, he departed the Bay Area for good, and he again reinvented his painting. Since his parents had moved to Oakland in 1919 with Berkeley in mind, being denied the position took on a personal dimension, and he resented it. Tucson became the setting for the final phase of his career, but he missed the Bay Area, to which he felt a sentimental attachment. Colescott was an artist who defied many of the conventions of artistic production of his time. In an era dominated by avant-garde movements-such as abstraction and conceptualism-Colescott remained faithful to a crude figuration, which relegated him to the margins of the contemporary art world. While artists of the period usually formulated a signature image and stuck to it, he felt a need to constantly reinvent himself and his work. That Colescott’s paintings of the 1970s explore issues related to black identity in such an aggressive and transgressive way also contributed to his marginalization, though his work would ultimately prove influential to a later generation of black artists. Colescott’s paintings are an expression of his remarkable life, and it’s only now, ten years after his death, that his life and works can finally be more fully understood.

54