Artist Umar Rashid on Curating a Robert Colescott Show for Blum LA

Robert Colescott’s most famous painting might just be George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975), which was acquired by the forthcoming Lucas Museum of Narrative Art at a Sotheby’s auction in 2021 for $15.3 million. But a new exhibition at Blum’s Los Angeles space aims to shed a different light on an artist best known for his biting social critique of the US.

 

Curated by LA-based artist Umar Rashid, “The Anansean World of Robert Colescott” brings together some 30 paintings and drawings from across five decades of Colescott’s career. Included in the exhibition are drawings from the early 1950s around the time when Colescott would have been studying in Paris under Cubist artist Fernand Léger, semi-abstract paintings from the late ’60s, and works from the height of his career from the ’70s to ’90s. Drawing influence from various trickster spirits, including Ananse, a spider deity and trickster from West African mythology, Rashid positions Colescott as the “grand trickster of the ages.”