A Death of an Old Mulatta was painted in 1991, just six years before Robert Colescott would become the first Black artist to represent the United States in the Venice Biennale in 1997. Across the center of the seven-foot-tall canvas is a mixed-race female figure, historically and pejoratively called a "mulatta," her skin tone marked in expressive brushstrokes of beige and brown. She is surrounded by a crowd of figures existing in a single plane, neither in the background nor the foreground. To the right at the woman’s feet is a dark-skinned figure whose face is composed of a multi-color map of Africa. To the left is a man with a yellow boot shaped like Italy, placed against a pale blue passage symbolizing the Mediterranean Sea. From there, it becomes clear that the lower left corner of the canvas depicts Continental Europe, placed in direct opposition to Africa on the other side of the composition—together representing the central figure’s two histories. Behind the outstretched mixed-race woman is a stage with open purple curtains, as if presenting this demanding scene to us.

 

“In the composition A Death of an Old Mulatta, Colescott redefines the poignancy of the negative image, that which centers on race mixing, race baiting, and the social conduct that was taboo in a segregated society. It also focuses on the piercing element so characteristic of art made by whites who poke fun at black physiognomies, particularly the facial features and anatomy of Black women. Colescott has taken all such symbols and reversed them, using them to subvert definitions of culture based on race.”
—David C. Driskell

Such thought-provoking pictures are what Colescott is known for. Born in 1925 and raised during the Great Depression, the artist often passed for a white man with his light-colored skin. After receiving his BFA at the University of California, Berkeley with a stint in Paris studying under Fernand Léger, Colescott returned to the U.S. in the 1960s at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. He soon embraced an expressive, figurative style, and in the 1970s, he used it to recontextualize art historical masterpieces by replacing traditional white figures with Black ones. By the 1980s, he was known as a leader in a new kind of image appropriation, and in the 1990s, he began to think more seriously about identity politics in late 20^th century America. This resulted in some of his most important and pressing works, A Death of an Old Mulatta included; paintings that Roberta Smith calls “almost operatic. The people push forward and overlap as if Colescott were thinking of Cubism.”ⁱ 

 

Operatic is an apt descriptor for the scene that unfolds from behind purple curtains in A Death of an Old Mulatta. The work’s title indicates that we are witnessing a tragedy—a woman in her last moments on Earth. Despite all the narratives playing out around her, our eyes are focused on this woman looking up towards the heavens, recalling one of the floating goddess-like figures Colescott painted in his much earlier Valley Queen series, 1964-1967. The effect is one which questions our conscious thoughts, or as Richard J. Powell describes, one “whose collective effect appeared more hallucinatory and abstract than logical and real. In A Death of an Old Mulatta, the assorted parts…all evoked a moving if disjointed requiem in which the painting’s nominal, deceased character, painted with a mottled or scumbled technique and possessing both Caucasian and sub-Sahara African skin coloring, spanned the picture plane between funereal curtains and the aforementioned components of her purported “passing” (pun intended).”ⁱⁱ 

“What you have to remember about Colescott is that he is seminal in that kind of double consciousness of black imagery. In a way, Colescott was poking fun at the history of black imagery, but he was also telling us to read history, to learn from it.”
—David C. Driskell

What is not fiction, however, is the underlying message Colescott relays in this picture. In American society, as the artist knew and experienced it, interracial marriages and mixed-race children were considered taboo, and even illegal; anti-miscegenation laws, which forbid interracial marriages in some states, were only declared unconstitutional in 1967. The term "mulatta" references the centuries of sexual violence perpetrated by white men against the Black women they enslaved. However fantastic and transcendant Colescott's composition, A Death of an Old Mulatta is rooted in real prejudice and violence, and the psychological torment racism inflicts. Indeed, as the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art puts it, “the tragic mulatto embodies the notion that the mixing of black and white blood results in an impossible conflict of being. Unable to fit in either society, he or she lives an ambivalent life that cannot be reconciled except in death.”ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Collectors' Digest

 

• Colescott is one of the most important painters of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. In October 2022, Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott, the artist’s first major retrospective since 1989, concluded at the New Museum, New York.

• A year before that in May 2021, his masterwork George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook set the world record for the artist for $15.3 million, selling to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles.

• Colescott's works are in the permanent collections of such esteemed museums as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Baltimore Museum of Art and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville.

 

 

ⁱ Roberta Smith, “Critic’s Pick: Robert Colescott Throws Down the Gauntlet,” The New York Times, July 7, 2022, online.

ⁱⁱ Richard J. Powell, Going There: Black Visual Satire, New Haven, 2020, p. 189.

ⁱⁱⁱ Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, “Power and Politics,” Conversations: African and American Artworks in Dialogue, 2014, online.