When Lowery Stokes Sims was a young curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a painting she loved was offered on loan to the museum. During a test run in the galleries, she gazed up at Eat Dem Taters (1975), Robert Colescott’s keen, bitter twist on Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters. In Colescott’s work, Van Gogh’s glum diners are Black, grinning ear to ear with goggly eyes, and seemingly grateful for table scraps. Sims’s colleague, she recalls, said, “You can either hang this or you can have a quiet summer.” The year was 1979. Sims opted for quiet and took it down. But what will happen this summer?
On June 30, the New Museum in New York City opens “Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott.” Born in Oakland in 1925, and trained in California, the artist famously studied with the master Fernand Léger in Paris, and taught in Cairo and elsewhere for decades. Since his death, in 2009, this is the first full-blown traveling retrospective dedicated to the polarizing painter. It is co-curated by Sims and the scholar Matthew Weseley, and coordinated by the New Museum curator Gary Carrion-Murayari.
