The artists of today owe a great deal to Robert Colescott. His career has the unique attribute of consistent relevance. Colescott embarked upon figurative expressionism during a time when the status quo was nonrepresentational work. He has made an impressive career out of stirring the pot through his employment of race, money and sexuality in his paintings. The outcome is often humorous, but Colescott’s subjects are not a laughing matter.

Colescott made a name for himself in the early 1970s lampooning history and Old Master paintings by inserting stereotypical African-American figures into classical images. In I Gets a Thrill Too When I Sees de Koo (1978), he makes a space for black people in the annals of modern art history by replacing the head of de Kooning’s seminal Woman with that of Aunt Jemima. Colescott also interjects his own image into these works, weaving a complex narrative in which his racially stigmatized body links to specific historic occurrences and artworks.

More recently, Colescott has taken up the use of shockingly vibrant colors and more fluid, stream-of-consciousness imagery than his earlier paintings. In Summer Time (1995), Disney-esque cartoons collide with an interracial couple in a sexually-charged, manically-colored environment.