A Black femme-presenting person sprawls in a scarlet armchair. Cigarette smoke curls upward and spells out the title “colored T.V.” across a hot-pink wall, while a flickering television glows with the busty blonde image of a prime-time starlet. The sitter seems to sit between relaxation and resistance. Behind them, a tidy fireplace radiates warmth, and a window frames the night sky with a shooting star, almost cartoonish in its wish-granting clarity. At the bottom edge, American artist Robert Colescott has literally written out the punchline: “WISHING ON A PRIME TIME STAR.” The scene is both cozy and uneasy, a living room where race, class, and desire collide. This painting is about longing, exclusion, and how television scripts identity. Colescott, known for wielding satire like a scalpel, described his method as “bait and switch” by drawing viewers in with humor, bright colors, and kitsch before cutting deep with social critique. The title itself is a double hit: “Colored TV” nods to the relatively-new color broadcasting technology, but also to the loaded racial label “colored.” The starlet on the screen is white, blonde, and unattainable; the viewer is Black, present, and excluded from the fantasy. Curators at SFMOMA underline the contrast: the work “asks us to notice the racial difference between the person who’s on the television and the person watching the television.” Colescott even added a gender twist, referring to the seated figure as a “colored transvestite,” which flips the lens back on how identity itself including race, gender, sexuality is performed, masked, and policed in American media. Colescott grew up on TV that erased or caricatured Black people, and he wasn’t shy about skewering the disconnect. The puff of smoke scrawling words, the melodramatic window star, and the campy set design doesn’t soften the blow; it sharpens it. It’s a reminder that for many in the 1970s, the American dream on-screen wasn’t built with them in mind.
“Colored TV” by Robert Colescott (American) – Acrylic on canvas / 1977 – San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (California) #WomenInArt #art #artText #artwork #RobertColescott #Colescott #Neo-Expressionism #Blueskyart #AfricanAmericanArt #AfricanAmericanArt #SFMoMA #SanFranciscoMuseumofModernArt
