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Stereotype or History?
John Haberin New York City
Robert Colescott and Kapwani Kiwanga
Not every artist wants to be remembered for a single painting—especially for a copy after a still more famous painting but in blackface. Yet Robert Colescott risked just that, in 1975, with a remake of Washington Crossing the Delaware as a minstrel show. It is a stereotype twice over, and it has stereotyped him as well. So much for African American art.
Colescott, though, might not have minded one bit. It was a breakthrough for him at age fifty, after decades in pursuit of European Modernism and the cheaper stereotypes of popular culture. It is also a savvy look back at Pop Art and the American dream. Still, there is a lot more to the ever-shifting career of a sophisticated artist. In his New Museum retrospective, "Art and Race Matters." Others at the museum would agree with every word of that tile, including Kapwani Kiwanga upstairs, with a return to Minimalism. 
Grin and bear it
Complain all you want, but Robert Colescott was asking for it with George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware (subtitled Scene from an American History Textbook). What is this, a joke? Well, yes and a one-liner at that—but art and race, it declared, could stand a sense of humor and a little shaking up. His actors try ever so hard to maintain their dignity, but it will not be easy. Several sport the forced grins of a minstrel show, but it will not rescue them from minor roles and the bottom of the small boat. The banjo player dresses as a fat cat and smokes a cigar, but his top hat has lost its lid and, whatever he is playing, the painting is silent.
Still, they know when to grin and bear it. With his wide blue eyes, a product of his eyeglasses, Carver himself looks sober and bookish. More than in the famous original by Emanuel Leutze, in the Met's American wing, the boat must navigate between lightning and clouds, while a black fish darts through the darkness, and a patch of sunlight frames General Washington. Another man, barely visible, grasps the half-crumpled flag for comfort as if playing it, too, like a banjo. Maybe the boat will make it across, despite the tin patch in its hull. And maybe the nation will one day outgrow its racism and its stereotypes.
Colescott was confronting both art history and stereotypes. Is Raft of the Medusa, by Théodore Géricault in 1819, French Romanticism's own troubled crossin? In Colescott's hands, it becomes mere wreckage on an open sea. With The Potato Eaters after Vincent van Gogh, an impoverished dinner makes much more sense in blackface. Eat them taters, scrawled on the painting, has a doubly bitter edge. Laugh all you like, but think twice all the same.
Colescott's popular success comes just where you might expect it, in the museum's large central room. This time, though, elevators open to the rear, onto a smaller room with a teasing overview. There he is in 1949, with a strangely muted painting of doors and windows. There he is again in 1980, as a black soldier and a prim white woman face one another across a map of the continental United States, looking for clear divisions or for common ground. There he is, too, in 2002, barely able to wield a brush in the face of Parkinson's disease, but with a fine display of red brushwork. Sketchy faces intrude, too, of both races—but not, as a few years earlier, bunnies.
How did he get from Modernism's sober grid to cartoon imagery, real people, and race in America? The question is implicit in those potato eaters, with a skilled rendering and deep colors that van Gogh himself had not yet achieved. The curators, Lowery Stokes Sims and Matthew Weseley, seek an answer in his discovery of cartoons in the late 1960s, a time of consumerism and psychedelics. They cite parallels and influences in Joan Brown, Robert Arneson, Roy de Forest, William T. Wiley, H. C. Westerman, and (of course) Robert Crumb (but not, oddly enough, Elmer Bischoff and Philip Guston). And they conclude with pencil sketches of song lyrics, comic characters, and Huck Finn turning his back on Jim. Left to himself, Colescott might have made a darn good cartoonist.
But he was not left to himself. He came to Paris on the GI Bill, where he studied with Fernand Léger. The Cubist later urged Louise Bourgeois to give up painting for sculpture and William Klein to take up photography, and he was no less stern but supportive now. Abstraction, Léger said, just did not have an audience, and he suggested figure painting instead—much as he himself had turned from Contrast of Forms in 1913 to card players and construction workers. Colescott paid tribute to his teacher as late as 1987, with Hard Hats. Just as important, he learned, maybe crowd pleasing is not such a bad thing.
Present dangers
Not, that is, when you can set your sights on the reality of urban America and its culture. Léger issued his advice at the worst possible time, at the dawn of postwar abstraction, with Jackson Pollock waiting in the wings. But it worked for Colescott. Léger could not have known television either, but the younger man sure did. He was fascinated by color television, with a pun on colored. And the more crowded and familiar his cast, the more it opened him to solid forms, less visible brushwork, and vibrant, clashing colors.
At first, Colescott acknowledges TV with paintings that might themselves be commercials, like cutouts of Old Crow liquor, with a pun on Jim Crow. Later a black woman watches TV herself, with a blond sexpot on-screen and a shooting star in the sky. Are these stereotypes? You bet, and today he might have had to weather criticism directed at Kara Walker (who has also riffed on Washington Crossing the Delaware), Kerry James Marshall, and Dana Schutz, a white artist who painted Emmett Till an open casket. Must art stick to upbeat images of blackness? Just to ask is to point to Colescott's challenge and his prescience.
Along with pop culture and urban realism, he also merges history and present dangers. Salome presents a black head on a platter to a blond King Herod. History means art history as well, as with Washington crossing the Delaware. Soon enough, though, Colescott found direct quotation limiting, and past art becomes harder to pin down. His Three Graces, patterned after Raphael, are a racially mixed trio obsessed with Art, Sex, and Death. One takes her hammer and chisel to a bust of Arte, to fashion it or to destroy it.
For all the outrage, he refuses to set black and white against each other once and for all, and he himself when young could sometimes pass for white. Saint Sebastian becomes half black and half white, while a black and white couple share the rope of a lynching. The Judgment of Paris becomes interracial seduction. Shirley Temple Black becomes black, in line with her married name, and gets to dance with Bill Robinson, Mister Bojangles himself. The connections and disconnections become harder to puzzle out, as paintings pack more and more people and colors into shallower spaces. Yet there is no getting around the challenge, just as there is no getting around racism in America.
Colescott dominates the New Museum, taking its largest floor and the greatest risks. One floor up, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca tackle colonial land grabs, with the dance contests and dance companies of "Five Times Brazil." They have poignant memories, of a child dead of hunger and the grim faces of an on-screen audience, but these are music videos all the same. In the lobby gallery, Doreen Lynette Garner reflects on the slave trade and its torments, with gruesome sculpture in silicone, glass, pearls, and synthetic hair. She dares you to look away from its echoes of animal innards and a goddess in white overlooking them all. She may have you in mind, too, when she calls the installation Revolted.
If Colescott is less prone to think in black and white, that, too, has its roots in Paris and his love for European art. The show's first room also includes a take on Olympia, by Edouard Manet, but with a weary, subdued courtesan at its center. Colescott puts in an appearance in the 1970s, too, but a characteristically modest one. As he repaints Henri Matisse, he turns toward the viewer and his own nude model, with a look that says "who, me"? The title is just as modest, Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder. And yet one day that me may cross racial barriers and the Delaware.
Hidden histories
With a background in anthropology and comparative religion, Kapwani Kiwanga brings a due understanding of diverse peoples to her work at the New Museum. Yet her greatest resource is the museum itself. She takes over its smallest display floor for a new commission and another recent work, but they come off as a single installation, each part of it responsive to the room and to the other. They partition that room, while enhancing its preexisting status as a single unbroken space. They nearly hide its walls while working directly on them and making them inescapable. And they rely entirely on natural light.
I had forgotten that the museum even has natural light. Its 2007 move to the Bowery, in architecture by SANAA, makes a big deal of its stacked and staggered boxes. This is a museum as the proverbial white cube, in quadruplicate. Yet Kiwanga has the topmost floor, with high ceilings, a narrow skylight above, and windows to either side, separated by the elevators and stairs. You may never have noticed either one—or the diagonal beam cutting across each window, dividing it into trapezoids. They could almost be the great trapezoidal windows of the former Whitney Museum, currently the Frick Madison, without the greatness.
It takes a lot to give New York's least sensitive museum space echoes of Marcel Breuer and his assertive but flexible architecture. Kiwanga, though, picks up on that trapezoid with Off-Grid—a white beaded curtain, a diagonal for its left edge. It hangs apart from and parallel to the east wall, itself painted a deep blue purple. Yet she could easily be drawing right on it, much like wall drawing by Sol LeWitt. As the work's title suggests, this is and is not Minimalism. It is about rigor, but also about freeing oneself from constraints.
Like the side windows, her resources remain all but invisible, scholarship included. For the curators, Massimiliano Gioni and Madeline Weisburg, this is a work of "historical imagination," but with a hidden history. In the past, they note, slaves over age fourteen could not go outside after dark without bearing lanterns or candles, and the artist updates that story of surveillance and state violence for her curtain. She melted down police floodlights as materials for its beads. She fashions the show's second work, thicker curtains, from sisal—a cottony fabric that drove the colonial and then independent economies of Tanzania and the Americas. The museum calls it an "imposing mass."
Then again, it might just be warm and cuddly. These days many a show has a back story in politics that one might never know from looking. And Kiwanga has plenty of stories in mind. She grew up in Ontario, on territory once ceded to Canada's indigenous First Nation, and she means to speak to its dispossession, too. Before, she has staged her own version of black America's Afrofuturism, as Afrogalactica. If all this sounds like one detached, academic exercise after another, she sees art with an anthropologist's eye—and from a safe distance, from her home in Paris.
Yet her work is broad and responsive, to a disturbing past and to her site. One sisal curtain bisects the arc of another, as Maya-Bantu, meeting it at a right angle. As you circulate, they and the room keep changing in relation to one another and to you. She also interrupts the blue background for narrow mirrors, tapering and multiplying like the trapezoids. Speak all you like about "systems of authority." This is art and history as a hall of mirrors.
Robert Colescott ran at the New Museum through October 9, 2022, Bárbara Wagner, Benjamin de Burca, Doreen Lynette Garner, and Kapwani Kiwanga through October 16.