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.”

“The appellation is incredibly apt in terms of his artistic practice,” Rashid writes of Colescott, “yet he was not born thus but forged through the crucible of being an African American fine artist in a time of limited opportunity for those like him and the ideas he sought to bring forth in a postindustrial world, burdened by draconian racial awareness, social lobotomization, and post-imperial, imperial war machinations.”

To learn more about the just-opened exhibition, which runs through May 17 at Blum Los Angeles, ARTnews spoke with Umar Rashid via Zoom ahead of its opening last week.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.

ARTnews: Robert Colescott is such a major figure in recent art history. Do you remember when you first saw his work?

Umar Rashid: I first came into contact with this work years ago—it was almost like a dream. I saw George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware [1975]. I didn’t know the title of it at the time, but I knew the iconic Leutze painting [that it is based on]. I’ve seen lots of Leutze paintings—well, everybody has. He’s America’s favorite fantasy writer, the George R. R. Martin of painting. When I was younger, my dad, who was a painter used to take me to a lot of museums to show me artworks, and he had a lot of art books. I knew Horace Pippin, Jacob Lawrence, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Elizabeth Catlett, so I already had a canon of Black painters in my mind. So, I remember seeing the Colescott and not thinking about or not looking at the cartoonish representation of Black people but just looking at Black people in general in the painting. But this painting just really stood out because it was something historical. At the time, I didn’t get the tongue-in-cheek aspect of it. I didn’t see all the things that were really happening. I just saw the image. So, that was the first introduction to his work, and I just remember that being something that was seared into my mind.

How do you think your relationship with Colescott’s work has developed in the years since, as you learned more about his practice?

After that, I would see his paintings periodically, mostly the historical stuff. But I was a young, rebellious painter. I didn’t want to have anyone’s imprint on what I was doing. I tried my best to eschew influences: Old Masters like Rembrandt down to Pippin, Lawrence, and Barkley Hendricks. The hardest one to do was [the influence of] Jean-Michel Basquiat because he was everywhere. But it just so happened in 2018 that I was doing an exhibition at the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson. I went downstairs for something, and I was walking through this labyrinth. I remember the curator of my exhibition, Olivia Miller, told me that Robert Colescott used to teach here, and his office was indeed in the basement underneath this slight catacomb of heating pipes for the building and the gallery upstairs where I was exhibiting. I thought, Wow, this is a historic place. So, I started looking at his work again. At this time, I was only familiar with his history paintings. I wasn’t familiar with his Léger era or his nudes. And even with his history painting, I wasn’t necessarily aware of all the elements they contained. I’m always more concerned about the totality of the image instead of the intricacies when it comes to other people’s work. Though when it comes to mine, I do notice them.

As I’m doing this show [in Tucson], which was titled “What is the Color When Black is Burned?,” the show was my retelling of an alternative history of the beginnings of the Mexican War for Independence. I had been doing paintings that retell history since 2006. I remember being excited about finding this great coincidence that Colescott had taught at this university, and I’m doing this work there. It just felt like it was kismet. When I was asked by Blum to curate this show, I jumped at it because of that experience. But I just wasn’t really aware of the scope and range of his work until I started going through the images of works that I could curate from. I was like, Oh, my God. And just reading about his story, going to war, studying in France under [Cubist artist] Fernand Léger, visiting Egypt—just the incredible life that he had was just so powerful.

What was your approach to curating the show? How did you go about narrowing down the works that you included?

I had over 1,000 works to look at, ranging from very large to very small. Given the age of the works, some works required restoration efforts as well. I had seen the Keith Haring retrospective at the Broad [in 2023], and I loved the way that they chronicled his short life by making a chronological path through the exhibition. It started with some of his earlier works like his design stuff, then went on to his more seminal works like graffiti, and it ended with these collages that were very devoid of color. I wanted to do that with Colescott, given his longer life. There were a lot of works in between his different phases, but they all were marked by the passage of time. This is a show for a commercial gallery, but I wanted to do it more like a museum retrospective because there’s so many works available.

I also wanted people to see his range, because a lot of times, especially now, in the current commercial art world, nobody really cares about range. They want to see your greatest hits and and I think that cheapens everyone’s worth. It would be really disrespectful to not show the range of someone like Colescott because he deserves so much more. He lived through so many different pivotal moments in American history, world history, the history of black people, and he deserves a wider look, an expanded view.

We ended up getting the show down to around 30 pieces. There are some very small works from the ’50s, his French era, kind of Cubist figurations, when he’s just getting his feet wet. Later, there’s the work from the ’70s, when he produces the history works. A lot of those are in private collections, so we are showing a lot of drawings and similar works that inform those more famous works. In the ’80s, his work became bigger and even more expressive in color. And towards the end [of his life], he goes into a super abstract mode that is still figurative. Initially, there was this very sharp focus on telling specific stories. It’s much like the cycle of human life, from birth to death: you start as a student, and then we become who we are and solidify that. Then we become the teacher. And then when we begin to lose our faculties, we become the transcendent.

That’s why initially I wanted to curate the show very linearly.  But that didn’t really work, because when you’re curating a show, you want to put on a show. You want people to be gobsmacked, really hit hard. So we managed to still put all the works together in chronological groups. But then they’re also mixed according to impact, color, and theme. Most of the drawings are together. Most of the earlier works are together. There’s a series of volcanoes that are all together. Thematically, I think that this show gives more than just a show that says, “Hey, this is Robert Colescott, with things that you might know.” It’s more like a journey befitting of his station and his character. I’m proud to have been a part of it.

Is there a body of work in the show that you think would surprise people who only know Colescott via his history paintings?

It’s such a range of works. I know what surprised me was his Léger years. They’re very small, intimate pieces. Nobody thinks about Picasso’s ballerinas, even though they were painted very well. When he started the Cubist works, then everything changed. That’s the same with Colescott’s work, which is always tied to this historical satire that often has a hyper-sexual narrative. But that earlier work is unfunny and has no satire. Some bits are a bit sexual, but not really. Then there are his drawings, which were more like paintings just scaled down and monochromatic.

You titled the exhibition “The Anansean World of Robert Colescott,” relating the artist to Ananse, a spider and trickster in the mythology of the Akan people of West Africa. Accompanying the exhibition is a newsprint publication with a text you wrote that expands on this concept where you call Colescott the “grand trickster of the ages.” How did you start thinking of Colescott as a trickster?   

A lot of African American painters embody this way of doing things because when you’re dealing with satire, and being scathingly critical of institutions or the current social paradigm. And the only person in history who was allowed to do that was the jokester or the trickster. In this case, you have Ananse who is a West African deity, mainly from Ghana. That pantheon also includes Osebo, the leopard, and Onini, the python. Ananse, the spider, always tricks them, foils their plans, or makes a mockery of them. I was really drawn to Ananse when I was a kid because it made me think about how there is a way to escape whatever this is—all this horribleness—by just being clever and smart. Sometimes, trickster can have a negative connotation, but in this light, it really brings to mind the weight that Colescott had to bear in order to be able to do this when he did it. More recently in the TV series American Gods, Ananse as a character was played by Orlando Jones. He did an amazing performance of Ananse, which just re-cemented the importance of Ananse as a character, especially as he relates to African Americans in the diaspora.

Did Colescott ever reference Ananse in his work or in the interviews he did?

It’s just something that hit me. I don’t think that he would refer to himself as a trickster. Ananse didn’t gain much popularity in the written histories of African Americans until around the Civil Rights Movement. When I first started working on the show, I didn’t realize how difficult it was going to be to talk about such a great person and such a complicated person. When I saw his works initially a long time ago, and then over the years, I always think of Colescott as the consummate trickster. He could talk about anything, and he painted everyone, not just Black and brown people. He had this very amazing world view. He wouldn’t be a jester; he would be more like a deity because of the way that which that he moved in and out of the world. A lot of people generally stick to a particular lane, maybe out of fear, or maybe out of ignorance or just a lack of knowledge of the world itself. But Colescott started his career in the ’50s pre–Civil Rights Movement, he was just doing what he did, as opposed to artists like Romare Bearden or Jacob Lawrence, who stuck to more traditional African American narratives and didn’t really go beyond it. Whereas Colescott just challenged the whole system from the beginning. In the interviews I’ve read, he had this very candid way of speaking about it, very loose but also very real. He managed to critique his own critics in the same breath in which he was making what would have been considered off-putting or offensive works at that time. It was just a brilliant master stroke of demi-god–like genius.

This happens in other cultures as well. I’m not saying that this is exclusive to people of African descent, but Colescott did it in a time where it was dangerous to do it but he did it anyway and he did it well. That’s where “The Anansean World of Robert Colescott” came from. Plus, he did the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale [in 1997]. There have been so many retrospectives. So I wanted to have a different take on his work—a magical, mystical take on who he was as a person. This was mine because I’ve never heard anyone refer to him as a trickster, much like how a court jester was the only one who was able to make fun of the king, characters who have to employ satire in order to be able to tell the truth. We could definitely use some satire in this world right now because it’s very unfunny and frightening for a lot of people. I think this is an important exhibition for the time because we definitely could use a bit of levity with regard to the 24-hour news cycle.