Robert Colescott

He is known for satirical genre and crowd subjects, often conveying his exuberant, comical, or bitter reflections on being African American.

The sculptor Sargent Claude Johnson was a family friend who was a role model to Colescott growing up, and was also a connection to the Harlem Renaissance and artwork dealing with African-American experience.

In 1940, Colescott watched as the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera painted a mural at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island near San Francisco.

He spent the following year in Paris, studying with French artist Fernand Léger, then returned to UC Berkeley, earning a master's degree in 1952.

The impact on the trajectory of the rest of his artistic career, in terms of both its formal qualities and subject matter, was first manifest in the series of paintings "The Valley of the Queens", inspired by a visit to Thebes.

"Three thousand years or non-European art, a strong narrative tradition, formal qualities such as the fluidity of the graphic line, monumentality of scale, vivid color and sense of pattern--all these elements had profound, immediate, and lasting impact on his work.

[6] Colescott's George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page From an American History Textbook (1975), based on Emanuel Leutze's 1851 painting of the Revolutionary War hero, putting Carver, a pioneering African American agricultural chemist, at the helm of a boat loaded with Black cooks, maids, fishermen and minstrels.

According to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Colescott was "the first African-American artist to represent the United States in a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1997.

According to his obituary by Roberta Smith: "While Mr. Colescott’s work was overtly political and multicultural, it was often at odds with the academic earnestness of such approaches.

He moved to the Pacific Northwest after graduation from UC Berkeley and began teaching at Portland State University.