ELIZABETH COLOMBA

Badass Women celebrates women who show up, speak up, and get things done .

Profile by Jennifer Mason.

Classically Trained Painter Elizabeth Colomba Paints the Women Art History Ignored.

Profile by Dodie Kazanjian in the October 2018 issue.

Elizabeth Colomba"s elaborately detailed paintings are beautifully subversive: revisiting black figures in art history and placing them center stage.

... Colomba generates a space for a subjects to inhabit - the re-writing of their history. In that sense, she analyses the construction of identity and the tangled interrelationship between past and present in our collective identity today.

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“...With a traditional easel at her studio’s center, Colomba cites the Old Masters as inspiration: “My favorite museum is the Louvre — all those classical paintings and the mastery of it brought me to painting.” And of her decision to move to New York: “It’s a return home, really. New York — it’s more like Paris.”

Recently, I saw Elizabeth Colomba’s work at the Long Gallery in Harlem,’The Moon is My Only Luxury‘. It was not only beautiful, but highly emotional, as black women are often portrayed in a limited context with a restricted history; this artwork enlarges their cultural equation by quantum leaps (...) My absolute favorite is ‘The Ants,’ The color, balance, and character of this work is exquisite, opulent and rich with a beautiful pregnant woman in an abundant striking mustard colored gown with Autumn colored accents, walking across the floor as she might in a fairytale, depicting a life of indolence and luxury.

The inaugural show at this new Harlem gallery is by the New York-based Martinican painter, whose opulent portraits of black women redress the erasures of women of color in nineteenth-century art history. At times, Colomba favors direct quotation; in one picture here, she depicts a model who appears in a Marie-Guillemine Benoist portrait from 1800. At other times, she prefers channelling; she has clearly made close study of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Colomba’s portraits of long-haired maidens can turn vaporous, but her best pictures—a portrait of a contemplative teen-ager with an arrow in her hand, a still-life with pineapple—are lush, ardent, and inspiring.

Artist Ayana V. Jackson interviews fellow artist Elizabeth Colomba and NY-based curator Monique Long.

‘The Pineapple Show’ is the strange story of an atypical protagonist, the pineapple, which is not allowed to express its own desires. It is used as a vehicle to project human consciousness and history, from the inane to the downright absurd.

Elizabeth Colomba's (born in Paris and based in Harlem, NY) new show, "The Moon Is My Only Luxury" (curated by Monique Long), challenges the historical stories of black women and dives into their moments of solitude.