Elizabeth Colomba Is Claiming Her Place in the History of Art

Elizabeth Colomba (born 1976, Épinay-sur-Seine, France; active New York, NY), The Denial of Saint Peter, 2017. Oil and gold leaf on canvas; 101.6 × 76.2 cm. Collection of the Nwabuzor Family. Artwork © Elizabeth Colomba / Artists Rights Society (A RS), New York.

The France-born, Harlem-based artist was recently featured in Vogue; she was commissioned to create a painting for New York City’s Park Avenue Armory; she has a painting in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Princeton University has hung her first solo museum exhibition.

Elizabeth Colomba: Repainting the Story is on view at Princeton University Art Museum’s Art@Bainbridge through May 8. The exhibition showcases Colomba’s large canvases that place historical and fictional Black women, often richly dressed, in the opulent spaces from which they have been erased or in which they were assigned subservient roles. “Colomba liberates Black women from traditionally restrictive story lines to reclaim and celebrate their visual autonomy,” says Curator Laura M. Giles in exhibition materials.

“In addition to lavish costumes and opulent settings,” continues Giles, “Colomba employs motifs from classical mythology, cultural history, and religious narratives to empower her protagonists, thereby reclaiming for them, in her words, ‘an egalitarian existence in a story from which the Black body is almost always absent.’”

Giles, who is the museum’s Curator of Prints and Drawings, first learned about Colomba through a colleague and went to see an exhibition of hers in Harlem in 2016. There, she discovered the watercolor “Clytie,” and recommended it for a museum purchase. Anything that is a work on paper falls under her domain, Giles points out. The exhibition was built around the purchase.

In “Clytie” we see a light-skinned bejeweled Black woman dressed to the antebellum nines, weeping inconsolably, alongside a gilded mantel over which hangs a painting of a white-skinned male lyre player (although all we can see are his legs and the bottom of his robes and the gilded scrolls of his instrument). Clytie, Giles reminds those of us who are rusty on our mythology, was a water nymph in love with, and spurned by Helios, the god of the sun. “I’m being polite by saying that she was betrayed and abandoned,” says Giles, hinting at a possibly more brutal encounter. Clytie subsequently wasted away pining for Helios, according to the myth, and Helios transformed her, out of pity, into a flower that turns toward the sun.

Elizabeth Colomba (born 1976, Épinay-sur-Seine, France; active New York, NY), Four Elements, Five Senses, 2018. Oil and gold leaf on canvas; 50.8 × 40.6 cm. Collection of Jennifer Hardy. Artwork © Elizabeth Colomba / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

In addition to the yellow flowers in Clytie’s hair, we see sunflowers in a vase with draped figures on it, emerging from shrubs, one caressing a serpent-like figure, as Eros flies above holding a bow and a torch. Giles cleverly found, with help from a colleague, a replica of that very vase in the art museum’s collection. The 19th-century Wedgwood vase mimics an ancient Roman vase in the British museum and appears in a vitrine next to the painting. Because the art museum is closed for construction of the Sir David Adjaye-designed building on the existing footprint (Art@Bainbridge is one of two outposts in Princeton’s Palmer Square that continues to provide a physical presence for the museum), it was no small feat to get the vase out of storage.

But it was worth it. During a visit to see the exhibition, Colomba was pleasantly surprised to see the actual vase, recounts Giles. “To this day, the vase remains an enigma to scholars who haven’t figured out what the figures mean. Clytie is turning her back on the vase.”

Acquiring the works for the exhibition, all from private collections, required logistics and Giles was assisted by independent curator and writer Monique Long.

The four galleries of Art@Bainbridge are devoted to the themes Giles has conceived the exhibition around: mythology, allegory, history, and the feminine sacred, which Giles defines as the presence of women in religious stories.

“Her works are layered in meaning and reference earlier work in art history,” says Giles, who earned a Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art from Harvard University, and was a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago before coming to Princeton in 2000. “There’s a lot to unpack in her work.”

Colomba’s painting of Eve, on view here, is unlike any other depictions of the biblical figure. Rather than in a garden, Eve – nude and draped with a satin sheet – sits on one of two mahogany sleigh beds covered with checkered blankets. A snake slithers between the two beds, and Eden is depicted in a painting within the painting, a still life overflowing with engorged cucumbers. “She also paints still lifes, but it was a curatorial decision to show the figures,” says Giles. “You rarely see Eve depicted on her own – (Albrecht) Dürer did two.”

Elizabeth Colomba (born 1976, Épinay-sur-Seine, France; active New York, NY), Laure (Portrait of a Negress), 2018. Oil on canvas; 116.8 × 116.2 × 3.8 cm (frame). Private Collection. Artwork © Elizabeth Colomba / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

One of Colomba’s more well-known paintings can be seen in the first gallery. “Laure (Portrait of a Negress)” takes the Black character from Edouard Manet’s “Olympia” – in which Laure is fully clothed and leaning into the reclining nude who is white (a painting, from 1868, said to have been scandalous in its day) – and places her on a cobblestone street on a rainy day, holding up a red parasol with one hand and her full ruffled skirts in the other. The scene evokes Gustave Caillebotte’s iconic 1877 painting “Rainy Day in Paris.” In Colomba’s version, Laure is an independent woman on her way to work as a model. Manet, who used Laure in other paintings, wrote in his notebook that she was a “très belle négresse” (very beautiful negress).

“I wanted Laure to be the star,” Colomba said in a video talk she gave for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art (PAFA) last year. “I wanted her to be walking toward the viewer, as if we are passing her in the street. We are acknowledging her, which is not the case in ‘Olympia,’ where she’s just fading into the dark green background. I wanted her to take center stage.”

There is a black cat in Manet’s painting, which Colomba reimagines on the cobblestone street, and the bouquet Laure is holding over the nude in “Olympia” is, in Colomba’s painting, visible in the hands of a man in a carriage behind her. Perhaps, in the moment after this painting, Laure turns back to purchase the bouquet and bring it to her employer as a prop.

“I wanted to see what kind of status women at the time had,” Colomba said in the PAFA video. We see a “courtesan” (prostitute) off to the right, and a nanny tending two children in the distance. “This shows the status of women at the time – your career was very limited. You could be a wife; you could be a courtesan; or you could be a nanny. Laure was also a nanny in different portrayals of her. I wanted to paint her as a woman working for herself, posing for an artist, and being a part of Paris.”

Colomba, 46, who lives in Harlem, was born in 1976 in Épinay-sur-Seine, just outside of Paris, to parents who emigrated from Martinique and ran a Caribbean restaurant. She demonstrated prodigious gifts in both painting and language arts at an early age.

Studying traditional art-making techniques at the Estienne School in Paris, at the École des Beaux-Arts, Colomba also learned on her own at the Louvre, taking in the works of Dutch masters, among others.

But even early in Colomba’s career, she was aware of the paucity of women who looked like herself in painting and set out to redefine the role of Black figures in art. She wanted others to experience what she felt upon seeing the few examples she had seen.

“I wish to reshape the narratives and bend an association of ideas so that a Black individual in a period setting is no longer synonymous with subservience and, by extension, does not instill fear or mistrust,” Colomba writes on her website. “The subject becomes the center of her own story and hastens it forward.”

She came to the U.S. in 1998, first to Los Angeles where she worked as a storyboard illustrator for the film industry. (Giles points out that, even today, Colomba’s paintings are all about telling stories.)

Seeing a disconnect between the commercial work and her personal approach to making art, Colomba moved to New York in 2011. By 2016 Colomba had a solo show – the very exhibition Giles attended -- about which The New Yorker wrote of as “opulent portraits of black women [that] redress the erasures of women of color in nineteenth-century art history.”

The artist has made short films and a graphic novel (“Queenie,” worked on during the pandemic and released in France; the American edition is expected this year), but painting is what she comes back to. Her portrait of Minerva (the Roman goddess of wisdom, poetry, weaving, medicine, and strategic warfare, among others), commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory in New York, is, according to Colomba’s Instagram feed, the first work by a Black artist gracing that institution’s walls, “permanently promoting an inclusive view of the world. My heart is full… The lady now enthrones in the main hall. Come visit her, I hope she’ll inspire you.”

In her 22 years at the museum, Giles says she and her colleagues have made “robust” inroads in building the collection to be inclusive, including acquisitions of works by Elizabeth Catlett, Mario Moore, Titus Kaphar, Gordon Parks, and Colomba. “I gravitated to Elizabeth’s work because it is figurative, and both critical and admiring of the Western canon.”

RELATED EVENTS 

April 14 @ 5:30pm EDT

Artist Conversation: Visual Storytelling and the Importance of Introspection

Artist Lashun Costor and Sarita Fellows, costume designer and lecturer in Theater at Princeton University, discuss Costor’s use of symbolism to create sculptures and wearable art that critique social and cultural issues in the United States.

April 21 @ 5:30pm EDT

Artist Conversation: Elizabeth Colomba and Autumn Womack

Artist Elizabeth Colomba and Autumn Womack, assistant professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University, discuss the significance of Colomba’s portrayal of the eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley.

April 28 @ 5:30pm EDT

Artist Conversation: Elizabeth Colomba and Jessica Bell Brown

Artist Elizabeth Colomba, and Jessica Bell Brown, curator for contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, discuss the process and meaning in Colomba’s multilayered narratives of historical and fictional Black women.