Painted in 1975 – the same year that kicked off the United States Bicentennial that celebrated the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution and establishment of the United States as an independent republic – the present work offers Colescott’s own bicentennial statement on American history. Colescott exposes the stereotypical portrayal of African American people in our country’s history: while the pejorative caricatures are immediately recognizable to the viewer as they have been widely seen and ingrained in our consciousness, less recognizable and known is the story of George Washington Carver. A Black man born in the 1860s into slavery, Carver went on to become a pioneering agricultural scientist at the Tuskagee Institute, and his innovations would go on to help struggling sharecroppers in the South, many of them former slaves.

Traditional history paintings such as George Washington Crossing the Delaware were commissioned by the wealthy and powerful elite in order to commemorate a historical event. Standing before George Washington Carver, Colescott calls to question the beliefs and mythology that grounds every aspect of our national identity, and, more poignantly, what voices and which demographics were left out of those narratives. In George Washington Carver, Colescott re-imagines Leutze’s iconic scene with George Washington Carver as the focus, replacing his namesake at the pinnacle of the ship. Surrounding Carver on the ship is a rowdy cast of black characters whose caricature-like representations are clearly informed by racist popular imagery, and meant to represent common racist stereotypes of the twentieth century that have informed mainstream consciousness: including a cigar-smoking banjo player, a servantly chef, an inebriated farmer, and a “mammy” figure, among others.

Born in Oakland, California in 1925, Colescott grew up during the Great Depression. After serving in World War II in a segregated army, Colescott embarked on a career in art and earned his BFA at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied European Modernism. During this time, Colescott traveled to Paris to study with Fernand Léger, whose influence on Colescott is readily apparent within the chaotic yet highly structured composition of the present work. In the early 1960s, Colescott travelled to Cairo, Egypt, where he spent several years studying and teaching. The artist returned to the United States in the mid-1960s to a county embroiled in the social and political tensions of the Civil Rights Movement. Excited by the different approaches to art he encountered in Egypt and dissatisfied with the narrow narrative scope offered by abstraction – especially as an African American within the heightened sociopolitical landscape – Colescott radically embraced a new figurative style and subject matter in his work. George Washington Carver emerges from the groundbreaking moment in which Colescott radically embraced this new mode, and masterfully captures the artist at the inception of his creative artistic brilliance.

Typifying the very finest of the artist’s oeuvre, George Washington Carver bursts to life in a lush painterly fusion of irony and sincerity, allegory and image, figuration and abstraction, bringing into sharp focus aspects of the contemporary Black experience left otherwise obscured. Three years after Sotheby's record-shattering offering of Kerry James Marshall's iconic Past Times in May 2018, George Washington Carver represents another crucial market-defining moment for one of the twentieth century's most celebrated African American painters.