Robert Colescott (1925-2009) used satire, parody and deliberately provocative racial and sexual stereotypes to confront racism, gender, power and the exclusion of Black people from dominant narratives of American history. Born and raised in Oakland, California, Colescott earned his M.F.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1952 and later studied in Paris. Living and teaching in Cairo from 1964 to 1967 profoundly affected Colescott’s understanding of race, culture and art. He subsequently moved away from abstraction toward the figurative paintings for which he became known. Beginning in the 1970s, he frequently reimagined well-known European and American paintings, replacing familiar figures with racialized caricatures to expose stereotypes embedded in art and popular culture. In George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975), for example, Colescott transformed an iconic image of American history into a biting commentary on race, representation and whose achievements are recorded and celebrated. Colescott’s work has influenced subsequent generations of artists examining race and identity. In 1997, he became the first Black artist to represent the United States with a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale.