Elizabeth Colomba

Elizabeth Colomba (born 1976) is a French painter of Martinique heritage known for her paintings of black people in historic settings. Her work has been shown at the Gracie Mansion, the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, the Musée d'Orsay, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Early life Colomba was born in Épinay-sur-Seine, where her parents had immigrated to from Martinique. As a child, she told her mother she wanted to become a painter after learning about Picasso. She began painting early, making watercolors as a child to decorate her parents' Caribbean restaurant. As a teenager, she read The Image of the Black in Western Art by John and Dominique de Menil, which inspired her to paint a portrait of her great-grandmother in the style of Whistler’s Mother. She continued to study the paintings of Louvre, especially the Dutch masters, and attended the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1998, she moved to Los Angeles and worked in storyboarding and illustration for the film industry.

In 2016, she had a solo exhibition of works at the Long Gallery in Harlem, which The New Yorker described as "opulent portraits of black women [that] redress the erasures of women of color in nineteenth-century art history."

In March 2022, her first solo museum show opened at Princeton University.

Notable paintings

Armelle (1997), depicting Colomba's cousin contemplating the painting Under the Palm Tree by Winslow Homer ; Biddy Mason (2006) Laure (Portrait of a Negresse) (2018), which is a reinterpretation of a painting by Edouard Manet Riding Places (2021) was included in the exhibition Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Other artworks

In 2018, the Metropolitan Opera's streaming series premiered Colomba's short film Cendrillon, starring Grace Bol. Colomba illustrated the 2021 graphic novel Queenie, the Godmother of Harlem, about Stéphanie St. Clair 157 Years of Juneteenth, a watercolor for a New Yorker cover celebrating Juneteenth