Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott, curated by Lowery Stokes Sims and Matthew Weseley, is the first comprehensive retrospective of the late African-American artist’s life and work.
The traveling exhibit recently left the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati and is now on display at the Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College. It’s packed with satiric, anti-racists imagery and shows how past white perceptions of Black people were framed by the shorthand of racist stereotypes.
Colescott’s art reversed the process when he released a group of paintings that subverted and deconstructed the caricatures of white supremacy. By that time, most Euro-Americans wanted to blot out their racist past. Colescott wanted them to see it.
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