Robert Colescott, born in Oakland, California in 1925. became recognized in the 1970s for his parodies of iconic paintings that he admired at the Louvre.  These works incorporated images from popular culture and ironic homage’s to historic masterpieces. 

Throughout the 80's and 90's, Colescott's paintings continued to be full of satire, presenting the social ills of race, sex, and western culture in humorous, yet thought-provoking ways. Over the last decade, Colescott's works have become increasingly abstract; allowing the viewer to focus on the movement of the paint itself, while analyzing the work for its enigmatic narratives.

Colescott was Emeritus Professor at the University of Arizona, Tucson and received numerous awards including grants from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1976, 1980, and 1983 and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for Creative Painting and Drawing in 1985. He was the only artist to represent the United States in a single artist exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1997.

Colescott lived and worked in Tucson Arizona for the past three decades until his untimely death in 2009. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, AZ then named him “Local Genius” of the year. 

His work is featured in the collections of the: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York;  Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, California; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, La Jolla, California; Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; Contemporary Museum of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii; Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona; Boston Museum of Fine Art, Boston, Massachusetts.