Art: Robert Colescott, Mickalene Thomas, Kerry James Marshall
Through May 13; seattleartmuseum.org.
Robert Colescott’s brutally pointed large-scale cartoons — most famously “George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware,” his infinitely satirical all-black remix of Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 original. Mickalene Thomas’s bright patchworks of psychedelic stained-glass hyperbole. Kerry James Marshall’s inspired use of art historical allusion and the color black.
They are three of the more brilliant ways American artists have come up with yet to confront the treatment of people of color in the Western canon. This flawless show will put together the three century-spanning painters — Colescott died in 2009, at the age of 83, Thomas was born in ’71, and Marshall falls right between them — for the very first time. WILL HEINRICH